<p dir="ltr">The growing movement toward sustainable use of ocean resources is driven by the pressing need to alleviate environmental and human stressors on the planet and its oceans. From monitoring the food web to supporting sustainable fisheries and observing environmental shifts to protect against the effects of climate change, ocean observations significantly impact the Blue Economy. Acknowledging the critical role of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) in achieving persistent ocean exploration, this research addresses challenges focusing on the limited energy and storage capacity of AUVs, introducing a comprehensive underwater docking solution with a specific emphasis on enhancing the terminal homing phase through innovative vision algorithms leveraging neural networks.</p><p dir="ltr">The primary goal of this work is to establish a docking procedure that is failure-tolerant, scalable, and systematically validated across diverse environmental conditions. To fulfill this objective, a robust dock detection mechanism has been developed that ensures the resilience of the docking procedure through \comment{an} improved detection in different challenging environmental conditions. Additionally, the study addresses the prevalent issue of data sparsity in the marine domain by artificially generating data using CycleGAN and Artistic Style Transfer. These approaches effectively provide sufficient data for the docking detection algorithm, improving the localization of the docking station.</p><p dir="ltr">Furthermore, this work introduces methods to compress the learned docking detection model without compromising performance, enhancing the efficiency of the overall system. Alongside these advancements, a station-keeping algorithm is presented, enabling the mobile docking station to maintain position and heading while awaiting the arrival of the AUV. To leverage the sensors onboard and to take advantage of the computational resources to their fullest extent, this research has demonstrated the feasibility of simultaneously learning docking detection and marine wildlife classification through multi-task and transfer learning. This multifaceted approach not only tackles the limitations of AUVs' energy and storage capacity but also contributes to the robustness, scalability, and systematic validation of underwater docking procedures, aligning with the broader goals of sustainable ocean exploration and the blue economy.</p>

Autonomous driving technology has the potential to revolutionize the way we think about transportation and its impact on society. Perceiving the environment is a key aspect of autonomous driving, which involves multiple computer vision tasks. Multi-scale deep learning has dramatically improved the performance on many computer vision tasks, but its practical use in autonomous driving is limited by the available resources in embedded systems. Multi-task learning offers a solution to this problem by allowing more compact deep learning models that share parameters between tasks. However, not all tasks benefit from being learned together. One way of avoiding task interference during training is to learn tasks in sequence, with each task providing useful information for the next – a scheme which builds on transfer learning. Multi-task and transfer dynamics are both concerned with the relationships between tasks, but have previously only been studied separately. This Master’s thesis investigates how different computer vision tasks relate to each other in the context of multi-task and transfer learning, using a state-ofthe-art efficient multi-scale deep learning model. Through an experimental research methodology, the performance on semantic segmentation, depth estimation, and object detection were evaluated on the Virtual KITTI 2 dataset in a multi-task and transfer learning setting. In addition, transfer learning with a frozen encoder was compared to constrained encoder fine tuning, to uncover the effects of fine-tuning on task dynamics. The results suggest that findings from previous work regarding semantic segmentation and depth estimation in multi-task learning generalize to multi-scale learning on autonomous driving data. Further, no statistically significant correlation was found between multitask learning dynamics and transfer learning dynamics. An analysis of the results from transfer learning indicate that some tasks might be more sensitive to fine-tuning than others, suggesting that transferring with a frozen encoder only captures a subset of the complexities involved in transfer relationships. Regarding object detection, it is observed to negatively impact the performance on other tasks during multi-task learning, but might be a valuable task to transfer from due to lower annotation costs. Possible avenues for future work include applying the used methodology to real-world datasets and exploring ways of utilizing the presented findings for more efficient perception algorithms. / Självkörande teknik har potential att revolutionera transport och dess påverkan på samhället. Självkörning medför ett flertal uppgifter inom datorseende, som bäst löses med djupa neurala nätverk som lär sig att tolka bilder på flera olika skalor. Begränsningar i mobil hårdvara kräver dock att tekniker som multiuppgifts- och sekventiell inlärning används för att minska neurala nätverkets fotavtryck, där sekventiell inlärning bygger på överföringsinlärning. Dynamiken bakom både multiuppgiftsinlärning och överföringsinlärning kan till stor del krediteras relationen mellan olika uppdrag. Tidigare studier har dock bara undersökt dessa dynamiker var för sig. Detta examensarbete undersöker relationen mellan olika uppdrag inom datorseende från perspektivet av både multiuppgifts- och överföringsinlärning. En experimentell forskningsmetodik användes för att jämföra och undersöka tre uppgifter inom datorseende på datasetet Virtual KITTI 2. Resultaten stärker tidigare forskning och föreslår att tidigare fynd kan generaliseras till flerskaliga nätverk och data för självkörning. Resultaten visar inte på någon signifikant korrelation mellan multiuppgift- och överföringsdynamik. Slutligen antyder resultaten att vissa uppgiftspar ställer högre krav än andra på att nätverket anpassas efter överföring.

<div> <div> <div> <p>An RGBZ synthetic dataset consisting of five object classes in a variety of virtual environments and orientations was combined with a small sample of real-world image data and used to train the Mask R-CNN (MR-CNN) architecture in a variety of configurations. When the MR-CNN architecture was initialized with MS COCO weights and the heads were trained with a mix of synthetic data and real world data, F1 scores improved in four of the five classes: The average maximum F1-score of all classes and all epochs for the networks trained with synthetic data is F1∗ = 0.91, compared to F1 = 0.89 for the networks trained exclusively with real data, and the standard deviation of the maximum mean F1-score for synthetically trained networks is σ∗ _F1= 0.015, compared to σF 1 = 0.020 for the networks trained exclusively with real data. Various backgrounds in synthetic data were shown to have negligible impact on F1 scores, opening the door to abstract backgrounds and minimizing the need for intensive synthetic data fabrication. When the MR-CNN architecture was initialized with MS COCO weights and depth data was included in the training data, the net- work was shown to rely heavily on the initial convolutional input to feed features into the network, the image depth channel was shown to influence mask generation, and the image color channels were shown to influence object classification. A set of latent variables for a subset of the synthetic datatset was generated with a Variational Autoencoder then analyzed using Principle Component Analysis and Uniform Manifold Projection and Approximation (UMAP). The UMAP analysis showed no meaningful distinction between real-world and synthetic data, and a small bias towards clustering based on image background. </p></div></div></div>

<p>Synthesized speech may be used for nefarious purposes, such as fraud, spoofing, and misinformation campaigns. We present several speech forensics methods based on deep learning to protect against such attacks. First, we use a convolutional neural network (CNN) and transformers to detect synthesized speech. Then, we investigate closed set and open set speech synthesizer attribution. We use a transformer to attribute a speech signal to its source (i.e., to identify the speech synthesizer that created it). Additionally, we show that our approach separates different known and unknown speech synthesizers in its latent space, even though it has not seen any of the unknown speech synthesizers during training. Next, we explore machine learning for an objective in the aerospace domain.</p> <p><br></p> <p>Compared to conventional ballistic vehicles and cruise vehicles, hypersonic glide vehicles (HGVs) exhibit unprecedented abilities. They travel faster than Mach 5 and maneuver to evade defense systems and hinder prediction of their final destinations. We investigate machine learning for identifying different HGVs and a conic reentry vehicle (CRV) based on their aerodynamic state estimates. We also propose a HGV flight phase prediction method. Inspired by natural language processing (NLP), we model flight phases as “words” and HGV trajectories as “sentences.” Next, we learn a “grammar” from the HGV trajectories that describes their flight phase transition patterns. Given “words” from the initial part of a HGV trajectory and the “grammar”, we predict future “words” in the “sentence” (i.e., future HGV flight phases in the trajectory). We demonstrate that this approach successfully predicts future flight phases for HGV trajectories, especially in scenarios with limited training data. We also show that it can be used in a transfer learning scenario to predict flight phases of HGV trajectories that exhibit new maneuvers and behaviors never seen before during training.</p>