Jump to Content
Martin Wicke

Martin Wicke

Martin Wicke completed his PhD at ETH Zurich on geometric modeling and simulation using particle methods. As a fellow of the Max Planck Center for Visual Computing and Communication and visiting Assistant Professor at Stanford University, he worked on learning system behavior to speed up fluid simulations, to improve routing in sensor networks, and localization in indoor environments. He worked on unified solid and fluid simulations at UC Berkeley and on video analysis as VP R&D at HighlightCam. Before joining Google, Martin worked on consumer-focused products simplifying and automating CAD and CAM, video-processing, VR, and using machine learning for developer tools.
Authored Publications
Google Publications
Other Publications
Sort By
  • Title
  • Title, desc
  • Year
  • Year, desc
    Preview abstract We present a novel approach for unsupervised learning of depth and ego-motion from monocular video. Unsupervised learning removes the need for separate supervisory signals (depth or ego-motion ground truth, or multi-view video). Prior work in unsupervised depth learning uses pixel-wise or gradient-based losses, which only consider pixels in small local neighborhoods. Our main contribution is to explicitly consider the inferred 3D geometry of the scene, enforcing consistency of the estimated 3D point clouds and ego-motion across consecutive frames. This is a challenging task and is solved by a novel (approximate) backpropagation algorithm for aligning 3D structures. We combine this novel 3D-based loss with 2D losses based on photometric quality of frame reconstructions using estimated depth and ego-motion from adjacent frames. We also incorporate validity masks to avoid penalizing areas in which no useful information exists. We test our algorithm on the KITTI dataset and on a video dataset captured on an uncalibrated mobile phone camera. Our proposed approach consistently improves depth estimates on both datasets, and outperforms the state-of-the-art for both depth and ego-motion. Because we only require a simple video, learning depth and ego-motion on large and varied datasets becomes possible. We demonstrate this by training on the low quality uncalibrated video dataset and evaluating on KITTI, ranking among top performing prior methods which are trained on KITTI itself. View details
    TensorFlow Estimators: Managing Simplicity vs. Flexibility in High-Level Machine Learning Frameworks
    Cassandra Xia
    Clemens Mewald
    George Roumpos
    Illia Polosukhin
    Jamie Alexander Smith
    Jianwei Xie
    Lichan Hong
    Mustafa Ispir
    Philip Daniel Tucker
    Yuan Tang
    Proceedings of the 23th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, Halifax, Canada (2017)
    Preview abstract We present a framework for specifying, training, evaluating, and deploying machine learning models. Our focus is to simplify writing cutting edge machine learning models in a way that enables bringing those models into production. Recognizing the fast evolution of the field of deep learning, we make no attempt to capture the design space of all possible model architectures in a DSL or similar configuration. We allow users to write code to define their models, but provide abstractions that guide developers to write models in ways conducive to productionization, as well as providing a unifying Estimator interface, a unified interface making it possible to write downstream infrastructure (distributed training, hyperparameter tuning, …) independent of the model implementation. We balance the competing demands for flexibility and simplicity by offering APIs at different levels of abstraction, making common model architectures available “out of the box”, while providing a library of utilities designed to speed up experimentation with model architectures. To make out of the box models flexible and usable across a wide range of problems, these canned Estimators are parameterized not only over traditional hyperparameters, but also using feature columns, a declarative specification describing how to interpret input data. We discuss our experience in using this framework in research and production environments, and show the impact on code health, maintainability, and development speed. View details
    Preview abstract We consider the problem of next frame prediction from video input. A recurrent convolutional neural network is trained to predict depth from monocular video input, which, along with the current video image and the camera trajectory, can then be used to compute the next frame. Unlike prior next- frame prediction approaches, we take advantage of the scene geometry and use the predicted depth for generating the next frame prediction. Our approach can produce rich next frame predictions which include depth information attached to each pixel. Another novel aspect of our approach is that it predicts depth from a sequence of images (e.g. in a video), rather than from a single still image. We evaluate the proposed approach on the KITTI dataset, a standard dataset for benchmarking tasks relevant to au- tonomous driving. The proposed method produces results which are visually and numerically superior to existing methods that directly predict the next frame. We show that the accuracy of depth prediction improves as more prior frames are considered. View details
    TFX: A TensorFlow-Based Production-Scale Machine Learning Platform
    Akshay Naresh Modi
    Chiu Yuen Koo
    Chuan Yu Foo
    Clemens Mewald
    Denis M. Baylor
    Levent Koc
    Lukasz Lew
    Martin A. Zinkevich
    Mustafa Ispir
    Neoklis Polyzotis
    Steven Whang
    Sudip Roy
    Sukriti Ramesh
    Vihan Jain
    Xin Zhang
    KDD 2017
    Preview abstract Creating and maintaining a platform for reliably producing and deploying machine learning models requires careful orchestration of many components—a learner for generating models based on training data, modules for analyzing and validating both data as well as models, and finally infrastructure for serving models in production. This becomes particularly challenging when data changes over time and fresh models need to be produced continuously. Unfortunately, such orchestration is often done ad hoc using glue code and custom scripts developed by individual teams for specific use cases, leading to duplicated effort and fragile systems with high technical debt. We present TensorFlow Extended (TFX), a TensorFlow-based general-purpose machine learning platform implemented at Google. By integrating the aforementioned components into one platform, we were able to standardize the components, simplify the platform configuration, and reduce the time to production from the order of months to weeks, while providing platform stability that minimizes disruptions. We present the case study of one deployment of TFX in the Google Play app store, where the machine learning models are refreshed continuously as new data arrive. Deploying TFX led to reduced custom code, faster experiment cycles, and a 2% increase in app installs resulting from improved data and model analysis. View details
    TensorFlow: A system for large-scale machine learning
    Jianmin Chen
    Matthieu Devin
    Manjunath Kudlur
    Rajat Monga
    Benoit Steiner
    Paul Tucker
    Vijay Vasudevan
    Pete Warden
    Yuan Yu
    Xiaoqiang Zheng
    12th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI 16), USENIX Association (2016), pp. 265-283
    Preview abstract TensorFlow is a machine learning system that operates at large scale and in heterogeneous environments. TensorFlow uses dataflow graphs to represent computation, shared state, and the operations that mutate that state. It maps the nodes of a dataflow graph across many machines in a cluster, and within a machine across multiple computational devices, including multicore CPUs, general-purpose GPUs, and custom-designed ASICs known as Tensor Processing Units (TPUs). This architecture gives flexibility to the application developer: whereas in previous “parameter server” designs the management of shared state is built into the system, TensorFlow enables developers to experiment with novel optimizations and training algorithms. TensorFlow supports a variety of applications, with a focus on training and inference on deep neural networks. Several Google services use TensorFlow in production, we have released it as an open-source project, and it has become widely used for machine learning research. In this paper, we describe the TensorFlow dataflow model and demonstrate the compelling performance that Tensor- Flow achieves for several real-world applications. View details
    TensorFlow: Large-Scale Machine Learning on Heterogeneous Distributed Systems
    Ashish Agarwal
    Eugene Brevdo
    Craig Citro
    Matthieu Devin
    Ian Goodfellow
    Andrew Harp
    Yangqing Jia
    Rafal Jozefowicz
    Lukasz Kaiser
    Manjunath Kudlur
    Dan Mané
    Rajat Monga
    Chris Olah
    Mike Schuster
    Jonathon Shlens
    Benoit Steiner
    Ilya Sutskever
    Kunal Talwar
    Paul Tucker
    Vijay Vasudevan
    Pete Warden
    Yuan Yu
    Xiaoqiang Zheng
    tensorflow.org (2015)
    Preview abstract TensorFlow is an interface for expressing machine learning algorithms, and an implementation for executing such algorithms. A computation expressed using TensorFlow can be executed with little or no change on a wide variety of heterogeneous systems, ranging from mobile devices such as phones and tablets up to large-scale distributed systems of hundreds of machines and thousands of computational devices such as GPU cards. The system is flexible and can be used to express a wide variety of algorithms, including training and inference algorithms for deep neural network models, and it has been used for conducting research and for deploying machine learning systems into production across more than a dozen areas of computer science and other fields, including speech recognition, computer vision, robotics, information retrieval, natural language processing, geographic information extraction, and computational drug discovery. This paper describes the TensorFlow interface and an implementation of that interface that we have built at Google. The TensorFlow API and a reference implementation were released as an open-source package under the Apache 2.0 license in November, 2015 and are available at www.tensorflow.org. View details
    No Results Found