Author Image

Hi, I am Ravi

Ravi Kothari

Perception Engineer at AVL

ML Engineer with 4+ years of experience specializing in Computer Vision, Natural Language Processing (NLP), and autonomous driving technology, with a strong focus on perception systems, deep learning models, and real-time processing pipelines. My expertise includes model optimization, data-driven decision-making, and the deployment of scalable ML solutions In my free time I like to read books, go for cycling and I have recently started bouldering.

Skills

Experiences

1

Regensburg, Bayern

Perception Engineer

March 2022 - Present

Responsibilities:
  • Knowledge Conformity of AI Models for Pedestrian Detection
  • Algorithm developer for AVL’s Dynamic Ground Truth system
  • Text guided image domain adaptation with Vision Foundation Models
  • NeRF Thesis Supervisor

e:fs TechHub GmbH

July 2021 - Jan 2022

Ingolstadt, Bayern

Master Thesis (Note 1,0/4,0)

July 2021 - Jan 2022

Responsibilities:
  • Object detection and motion forecasting with Raw Radar data and Deep neural Net
  • Fusion of Range – Angle – Doppler maps with Cross Attention module
  • Velocity and motion prediction using Temporal Fusion
2

3
Daimler Electric drives R&D

Dec 2020 - May 2021

Stuttgart, BW

Intern

Dec 2020 - May 2021

Responsibilities:
  • Familiarization with the topics of driving resistance and driving power calculation
  • Development of a master Matlab tool for multiple topologies (P2 / P24 / BEV / FCEV)

Aachen, NRW

Student Assistant

Feb 2020 - Nov 2020

Responsibilities:
  • Model building of Plug in Hybrid Electric Vehicle (PHEV) with Simulink and MATLAB
  • Developing a Energy Management Controller for VW Crafter with Dynamic Programming and Neural Network
4

5

Aachen, NRW

Self Driving Lab I/II

Oct 2019 - Sep 2020

Responsibilities:
  • Developing Modules for Sensor fusion, Object detection, path planning und vehicle control
  • Implementation and testing of ADAS stack in ROS-Framework
  • Used real world Lidar and Camera data

Tata Steel

July 2017 - Aug 2019

Kalinganagar, India

Blast Furnace manager

July 2017 - Aug 2019

Responsibilities:
  • Leading a team of engineers and 8 technicians
  • Developing a Gearbox Health monitoring system
  • Implemented a steel rebar counter using Open CV and ROS
6

7
IIT K Motorsports – BAJA Team

April 2015 - May 2016

Kanpur, India

Technical Lead

April 2015 - May 2016

Responsibilities:
  • Leading a team of 25 students for developing an All-Terrain Vehicle
  • Manufacturing and assembly of an ATV drive train
  • Production und Testing of CFRP links

Education

2019-2021
M.Sc Automotive Engineering
CGPA: 1,7 out of 4
2013-2017
B.Tech. Mechanical Engineering
CGPA: 1,4 out of 4
Extracurricular Activities:
  • Trek to Kanchenjunga base camp (17000ft)
  • Played squash at College level
  • Participated in multiple half marathon
Higher Secondary School Certificate
Percentage: 90.8 out of 100

Projects

Just Better Data
AP lead January 2024 - Ongoing

A pipeline to generate adverse weather data via text guided diffusion models.

KI Data tooling
Developer March 2022 - September 2023

A tool for collecting and evaluating sythetic data and real data for effective training of Perception DNNs.

KI Wissen
Developer August 2022 - Jan 2024

Integrating world knowledge in DNN to improve Vurlnerable Road User detections.

Automatic Rebar Counting
Team member Jan 2018 - April 2018

Open CV based rebar counting, tested and deployed in a steel mill.

Publications

Object Detection and Heading Forecasting by fusing Raw Radar Data using Cross Attention
ArXiv Preprint June 2022

In this paper, we propose a neural network for object detection and heading forecasting based on radar by fusing three raw radar channels with a cross-attention mechanism. We also introduce an improved ground truth augmentation method based on Bivariate norm, which represents the object labels in a more realistic form for radar measurements. Our results show 5% better mAP compared to state-of-the-art methods.

Self-Supervised Multimodal NeRF for Autonomous Driving
Preprint Sept 2024

In this paper, we propose a Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) based framework, referred to as Novel View Synthesis Framework (NVSF). It jointly learns the implicit neural representation of space and time-varying scene for both LiDAR and Camera. We test this on a real-world autonomous driving scenario containing both static and dynamic scenes. Compared to existing multimodal dynamic NeRFs, our framework is self-supervised, thus eliminating the need for 3D labels. For efficient training and faster convergence, we introduce heuristic based image pixel sampling to focus on pixels with rich information. To preserve the local features of LiDAR points, a Double Gradient based mask is employed. Extensive experiments on the KITTI-360 dataset show that, compared to the baseline models, our Framework has reported best performance on both LiDAR and Camera domain.

Accomplishments

Deep Learning Specialization
DeepLearning.AI August 2022

This course helps to understand the ML key concepts such as foundation of NN, Hyperparameter tuning, ML Pipleline structuring, CNN models, Transformers and sequence models. Each of the modules comes with muliple assignments and projects.

Dataset Analysis and Training with AutoML
Coursera September 2022

This course provides a broad introduction to exploratory data analysis (EDA), automated machine learning (AutoML), and text classification algorithms.

Docker and Kubernetes the Complete Guide
Udemy December 2022

This course provides a through understanding of docker images and compose, along with CI-CD deployment with github actions and Travis CI. These are further augmented with multiple projects in Kubernetes and AWS hosting .