Work Description

Driving in the Matrix

Steps to reproduce training results for the paper
Driving in the Matrix: Can Virtual Worlds Replace Human-Generated Annotations for Real World Tasks?
conducted at UM & Ford Center for Autonomous Vehicles (FCAV).

Specifically, we will train MXNet RCNN on our
10k dataset
and evaluate on KITTI.

System requirements

To run training, you need CUDA 8, NVIDIA Docker
and a linux machine with at least one Nvidia GPU installed. Our training was conducted using 4 Titan-X GPUs.

Training time per epoch for us was roughly
10k: 40 minutes,
50k: 3.3 hours,
200k: 12.5 hours. We plan on providing the trained parameters from the best performing epoch for 200k soon.

Download the dataset

Create a directory and download the archive files for 10k images, annotations and image sets from our website.
Assuming you have downloaded these to a directory named ditm-data (driving in the matrix data):


$ ls -1 ditm-data
repro_10k_annotations.tgz
repro_10k_images.tgz
repro_image_sets.tgz


Extract them.


$ pushd ditm-data
$ tar zxvf repro_10k_images.tgz
$ tar zxvf repro_10k_annotations.tgz
$ tar zxvf repro_image_sets.tgz
$ popd
$ ls -1 ditm-data/VOC2012
Annotations
ImageSets
JPEGImages


Train on GTA

To make training as reproducible (across our own machines, and now for you!) as possible, we ran training within
a docker container as detailed here.

If you are familiar with MXNet and its RCNN example and already have it installed, you will likely feel comfortable
adapting these examples to run outside of docker.

Build the MXNet RCNN Container


$ git clone https://github.com/umautobots/nn-dockerfiles.git
$ pushd nn-dockerfiles
$ docker build -t mxnet-rcnn mxnet-rcnn
$ popd


This will take several minutes.


$ docker images | grep mxnet
mxnet-rcnn latest bb488173ad1e 25 seconds ago 5.54 GB


Download pre-trained VGG16 network


$ mkdir -p pretrained-networks
$ cd pretrained-networks && wget http://data.dmlc.ml/models/imagenet/vgg/vgg16-0000.params && cd -


Kick off training

``
$ mkdir -p training-runs/mxnet-rcnn-gta10k
$ nvidia-docker run --rm --name run-mxnet-rcnn-end2end \
#container volume mapping\
-vpwd/training-runs/mxnet-rcnn-gta10k:/media/output \
-vpwd/pretrained-networks:/media/pretrained \
-vpwd/ditm-data:/root/mxnet/example/rcnn/data/VOCdevkit \
-it mxnet-rcnn \
# python script` \
python train_end2end.py \
--image_set 2012_trainval10k \
--root_path /media/output \
--pretrained /media/pretrained/vgg16 \
--prefix /media/output/e2e \
--gpus 0 \
2>&1 | tee training-runs/mxnet-rcnn-gta10k/e2e-training-logs.txt

...
INFO:root:Epoch[0] Batch [20] Speed: 6.41 samples/sec Train-RPNAcc=0.784970, RPNLogLoss=0.575420, RPNL1Loss=2.604233, RCNNAcc=0.866071, RCNNLogLoss=0.650824, RCNNL1Loss=0.908024,

INFO:root:Epoch[0] Batch [40] Speed: 7.10 samples/sec Train-RPNAcc=0.807546, RPNLogLoss=0.539875, RPNL1Loss=2.544102, RCNNAcc=0.895579, RCNNLogLoss=0.461218, RCNNL1Loss=1.019715,

INFO:root:Epoch[0] Batch [60] Speed: 6.76 samples/sec Train-RPNAcc=0.822298, RPNLogLoss=0.508551, RPNL1Loss=2.510861, RCNNAcc=0.894723, RCNNLogLoss=0.406725, RCNNL1Loss=1.005053,

...
```

As the epochs complete, the trained parameters will be available inside training-runs/mxnet-rcnn-gta10k.

Training on other segments

To train on 50k or 200k, first download and extract repro_200k_images.tgz and repro_200k_annotations.tgz and then
run a similar command as above but with image_set set to 2012_trainval50k or 2012_trainval200k.

Evaluate on KITTI

Download the KITTI object detection dataset

Convert it to VOC format

Evaluate GTA10k trained network on KITTI

Convert VOC evaluations to KITTI format

Run KITTI's benchmark on results

Citation

If you find this useful in your research please cite:

M. Johnson-Roberson, C. Barto, R. Mehta, S. N. Sridhar, K. Rosaen and R. Vasudevan, “Driving in the matrix: Can virtual worlds replace human-generated annotations for real world tasks?,” in IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, pp. 1–8, 2017.

@inproceedings{Johnson-Roberson:2017aa,
Author = {M. Johnson-Roberson and Charles Barto and Rounak Mehta and Sharath Nittur Sridhar and Karl Rosaen and Ram Vasudevan},
Booktitle = {{IEEE} International Conference on Robotics and Automation},
Date-Added = {2017-01-17 14:22:19 +0000},
Date-Modified = {2017-02-23 14:37:23 +0000},
Keywords = {conf},
Pages = {1--8},
Title = {Driving in the Matrix: Can Virtual Worlds Replace Human-Generated Annotations for Real World Tasks?},
Year = {2017}}