Title: Feature discovery and visualization of robot mission data using convolutional autoencoders and Bayesian nonparametric topic models,
Abstract: The gap between our ability to collect interesting data and our ability to
analyze these data is growing at an unprecedented rate. Recent algorithmic
attempts to fill this gap have employed unsupervised tools to discover
structure in data. Some of the most successful approaches have used
probabilistic models to uncover latent thematic structure in discrete data.
Despite the success of these models on textual data, they have not generalized
as well to image data, in part because of the spatial and temporal structure
that may exist in an image stream.
We introduce a novel unsupervised machine learning framework that
incorporates the ability of convolutional autoencoders to discover features
from images that directly encode spatial information, within a Bayesian
nonparametric topic model that discovers meaningful latent patterns within
discrete data. By using this hybrid framework, we overcome the fundamental
dependency of traditional topic models on rigidly hand-coded data
representations, while simultaneously encoding spatial dependency in our topics
without adding model complexity. We apply this model to the motivating
application of high-level scene understanding and mission summarization for
exploratory marine robots. Our experiments on a seafloor dataset collected by a
marine robot show that the proposed hybrid framework outperforms current
state-of-the-art approaches on the task of unsupervised seafloor terrain
characterization.