On August 6th, 2019, Prof. Xinming Huang from Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), America visited School of Artificial Intelligence and Automation a-nd gave a report titled “Deep Learning for Autonomous Vehicle Perception”. More than 20 teachers and students attended the seminar.
Prof. Xinming Huang received his Ph. D. degree in Electrical Engineering from Virginia Tech in 2001. After graduation, he entered the headquarter of Bell Labs in New Jersey as a researcher in Wireless Advanced Technology Laboratory. Then in 2006, he joined the Department of Electrical Engineering and Comp-uter System in WPI. In 2015, he became the youngest professor in WPI and now he is the Chair Professor. Prof. Huang successively won the Bell Labs Excelle-nce Award of the Year, IBM Academy Award, DARPA Young Faculty Award, IEEE HKN Excellent Professor Award and WPI Professor Achievement Award. Prof. Huang published more than 140 papers in IEEE journals and well-known conferences, and he took charge of about 20 scientific research projects of Natio-nal Science Foundation and NIH Foundation of United States. His main research field is integrated circuit design and network physics system and his research i-nterests include wireless communication and error correction code, information safety, computational vision, deep learning, driverless and IOT system.
In his report, Prof. Huang first introduced the research background, meaning and classification of self-driving cars and elaborated the necessity and possibili-ty of self-driving cars. Then he introduced the core technologies involved in the current research on unmanned driving, including computer vision, machine lear-ning, sensor fusion, autonomous control, vehicle communication and so on. He pointed out some issues that need to be concerned about self-driving cars, such -as transport infrastructure, legal policies and insurance responsibilities. Furthermore, Prof. Huang introduced the research achievements and progress of WPI in self-driving cars, which mainly focus on the perception and machine learning algorithm and its real-time implementation on software/hardware platform. He poin-ted out that the vision-based and LiDAR-based perception technology includes road segmentation, lane detection, traffic sign detection and classification, traffic -light detection and recognition, road sign detection, vehicle detection, pedestrian detection and so on. At present, his research team has built a full-featured prot-otype of the self-driving vehicle and has collected a lot of data using camera sensors, such as cameras, lidar, radar, GPS and IMU. Their research goal is to prop-ose new algorithms and technologies for automatic driving and evaluate them in road tests. Last, Prof. Huang introduced the WPI-related policies on studying a-broad and encouraged teachers and students to visit WPI.
Prof. Huang’s report was easy to understand, and he had frequent interactions with teachers and students. The atmosphere on the spot was warm and the p-articipants were inspired a lot.