Towaki Takikawa
I am a first-year Computer Science PhD student at the
University of Toronto, supervised by
Sanja Fidler and
Alec Jacobson.
I also work at NVIDIA Research
on the Hyperscale Graphics Research group under
Morgan McGuire.
My research interests focus on computer vision and computer graphics. Specifically, I'm
interested in exploring a suitable representation for 3D geometry that is amenable
to machine-learning driven geometry processing algorithms.
Outside of research, I also have experience working on both
software and hardware for robotics related projects.
I generally enjoy straddling the line between research and engineering.
I come from a small town in Oregon named Corvallis,
but these days I hang out in Canada.
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Publications
(* Denotes equal contribution.)
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Gated-SCNN: Gated Shape CNNs for Semantic Segmentation
Towaki Takikawa*, David Acuna*, Varun Jampani, Sanja Fidler
International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2019
Abstract /
Bibtex /
Project Website
Current state-of-the-art methods for image segmentation form a dense image representation where the color, shape and texture information are all processed together inside a deep CNN. This however may not be ideal as they contain very different type of information relevant for recognition. Here, we propose a new two-stream CNN architecture for semantic segmentation that explicitly wires shape information as a separate processing branch, i.e. shape stream, that processes information in parallel to the classical stream. Key to this architecture is a new type of gates that connect the intermediate layers of the two streams. Specifically, we use the higher-level activations in the classical stream to gate the lower-level activations in the shape stream, effectively removing noise and helping the shape stream to only focus on processing the relevant boundary-related information. This enables us to use a very shallow architecture for the shape stream that operates on the image-level resolution. Our experiments show that this leads to a highly effective architecture that produces sharper predictions around object boundaries and significantly boosts performance on thinner and smaller objects. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the Cityscapes benchmark, in terms of both mask (mIoU) and boundary (F-score) quality, improving by 2% and 4% over strong baselines.
@inproceedings{Takikawa2019GatedSCNNGS,
title={Gated-SCNN: Gated Shape CNNs for Semantic Segmentation},
author={Towaki Takikawa and David Acuna and Varun Jampani and Sanja Fidler},
year={2019}
}
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NVIDIA
Research Intern
Toronto, ON, Canada
February, 2020 - Present
Mentor: Morgan McGuire
Research on machine learning for computer graphics on the Hyperscale Graphics Research group.
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WATonomous
Software Director / Mentor
Waterloo, ON, Canada
May, 2017 - May, 2020
Helping the team engineer a fully autonomous Cheverolet Bolt.
Certified by GM as a designated test driver.
Working across the pipeline on perception, prediction, localization, planning.
Managing over 100+ students and 6 different software subteams.
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Preferred Networks
Research Intern
Tokyo, Japan
May, 2019 - August, 2019
Mentor: Richard Calland, Tommi Kerola
Research on weakly-supervised instance segmentation.
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NVIDIA
Research Intern
Toronto, ON, Canada
January, 2019 - April, 2019
Mentor: David Acuna, Sanja Fidler
Research on representation learning for semantic segmentation.
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University of Waterloo
Research Assistant
Waterloo, ON, Canada
September, 2018 - May, 2020
Mentor: Yuri Boykov
Research on weakly-supervised semantic segmentation and domain adaptation.
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NVIDIA
Systems Software Engineering Intern
Santa Clara, CA, USA
May, 2018 - August, 2018
Worked in the autonomous vehicles engineering team.
Developed data labeling and data recording systems in C / C++.
Performed hardware verification and validation in the lab.
Helped architect a hardware-based sensor synchronization system.
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Tulip Interfaces
Software Engineering Intern
Somerville, MA, USA
May, 2017 - August, 2017
Worked on software infrastructure and internal tools.
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Active911
Software Engineering Intern
Philomath, OR, USA
June, 2016 - August, 2016
Worked on software infrastructure and backend development.
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Linn Benton Community College
Software Engineering Intern
Corvallis, OR, USA
June, 2015 - August, 2015
Worked on curriculum development for an introductory CS course.
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Oregon State University
Research Intern
Corvallis, OR, USA
June, 2014 - August, 2014
Mentor: Alex Groce
Research in automated software verification and validation.
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Custom Gearbox
6 CIM Anodized
Quaternion Blast
CodeDay Portland 2015
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