Deep leaning-based ultra-fast stair detection.

Journal: Scientific reports
Published Date:

Abstract

Staircases are some of the most common building structures in urban environments. Stair detection is an important task for various applications, including the environmental perception of exoskeleton robots, humanoid robots, and rescue robots and the navigation of visually impaired people. Most existing stair detection algorithms have difficulty dealing with the diversity of stair structure materials, extreme light and serious occlusion. Inspired by human perception, we propose an end-to-end method based on deep learning. Specifically, we treat the process of stair line detection as a multitask involving coarse-grained semantic segmentation and object detection. The input images are divided into cells, and a simple neural network is used to judge whether each cell contains stair lines. For cells containing stair lines, the locations of the stair lines relative to each cell are regressed. Extensive experiments on our dataset show that our method can achieve 81.49[Formula: see text] accuracy, 81.91[Formula: see text] recall and 12.48 ms runtime, and our method has higher performance in terms of both speed and accuracy than previous methods. A lightweight version can even achieve 300+ frames per second with the same resolution.

Authors

  • Chen Wang
    Department of Cardiovascular Surgery, Union Hospital, Tongji Medical College, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, Hubei, China.
  • Zhongcai Pei
    School of Automation Science and Electrical Engineering, Beihang University, Beijing 100191, China.
  • Shuang Qiu
    College of Food Science and Nutritional Engineering, China Agricultural University, P.O. Box 40, No. 17 Qinghua East Road, Haidian District Beijing, 100083 People's Republic China.
  • Zhiyong Tang
    School of Automation Science and Electrical Engineering, Beihang University, Beijing, 100191, China. zyt_76@buaa.edu.cn.