Technology Innovation Institute (TII) and HeroX are launching a crowdsourcing competition seeking to accelerate how to effectively track objects in low-light conditions for both structured and unstructured environments.
The Infrared Tracking Challenge from TII, a scientific research center of Abu Dhabi’s Advanced Technology Research Council (ATRC), is to help accelerate the move to autonomous vehicles that must navigate environments with challenging lighting conditions. TII said current perception-based tracking algorithms often fall short, so the institute is exploring how radiometric sensors, which can provide infrared rather than photometric frames, can track object tracking in low light.
“Autonomous vehicles are the future,” said Dr. Najwa Aaraj, chief researcher of the Cryptography Research Center, and chief researcher of the Autonomous Robotics Research Center at TII. “While autonomous driving technology still has some ways to go in achieving operational and technical impeccability, this Challenge will help innovators find solutions to ensure that autonomous vehicles on our roads operate as safely as possible. Such advancements will launch us into a bold, new phase of our autonomous transportation journey, and we are eager to see what the crowd comes up with.”
The challenge
Any innovator, start up, research institute or university students globally can participate in TII’s Infrared Tracking Challenge.
Participants can use publicly available datasets with similar content as TII, providing sample datasets and utilizing color-to-thermal domain adaptation techniques when necessary.
Prizes will be awarded to three winners with a prize pool of $75,000.
