9,492 research outputs found
Learning-based Image Enhancement for Visual Odometry in Challenging HDR Environments
One of the main open challenges in visual odometry (VO) is the robustness to
difficult illumination conditions or high dynamic range (HDR) environments. The
main difficulties in these situations come from both the limitations of the
sensors and the inability to perform a successful tracking of interest points
because of the bold assumptions in VO, such as brightness constancy. We address
this problem from a deep learning perspective, for which we first fine-tune a
Deep Neural Network (DNN) with the purpose of obtaining enhanced
representations of the sequences for VO. Then, we demonstrate how the insertion
of Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) allows us to obtain temporally consistent
sequences, as the estimation depends on previous states. However, the use of
very deep networks does not allow the insertion into a real-time VO framework;
therefore, we also propose a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) of reduced size
capable of performing faster. Finally, we validate the enhanced representations
by evaluating the sequences produced by the two architectures in several
state-of-art VO algorithms, such as ORB-SLAM and DSO
LDSO: Direct Sparse Odometry with Loop Closure
In this paper we present an extension of Direct Sparse Odometry (DSO) to a
monocular visual SLAM system with loop closure detection and pose-graph
optimization (LDSO). As a direct technique, DSO can utilize any image pixel
with sufficient intensity gradient, which makes it robust even in featureless
areas. LDSO retains this robustness, while at the same time ensuring
repeatability of some of these points by favoring corner features in the
tracking frontend. This repeatability allows to reliably detect loop closure
candidates with a conventional feature-based bag-of-words (BoW) approach. Loop
closure candidates are verified geometrically and Sim(3) relative pose
constraints are estimated by jointly minimizing 2D and 3D geometric error
terms. These constraints are fused with a co-visibility graph of relative poses
extracted from DSO's sliding window optimization. Our evaluation on publicly
available datasets demonstrates that the modified point selection strategy
retains the tracking accuracy and robustness, and the integrated pose-graph
optimization significantly reduces the accumulated rotation-, translation- and
scale-drift, resulting in an overall performance comparable to state-of-the-art
feature-based systems, even without global bundle adjustment
Unsupervised Learning of Depth and Ego-Motion from Video
We present an unsupervised learning framework for the task of monocular depth
and camera motion estimation from unstructured video sequences. We achieve this
by simultaneously training depth and camera pose estimation networks using the
task of view synthesis as the supervisory signal. The networks are thus coupled
via the view synthesis objective during training, but can be applied
independently at test time. Empirical evaluation on the KITTI dataset
demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach: 1) monocular depth performing
comparably with supervised methods that use either ground-truth pose or depth
for training, and 2) pose estimation performing favorably with established SLAM
systems under comparable input settings.Comment: Accepted to CVPR 2017. Project webpage:
https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~tinghuiz/projects/SfMLearner
Belief-space Planning for Active Visual SLAM in Underwater Environments.
Autonomous mobile robots operating in a priori unknown environments must be able to integrate path planning with simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) in order to perform tasks like exploration, search and rescue, inspection, reconnaissance, target-tracking, and others. This level of autonomy is especially difficult in underwater environments, where GPS is unavailable, communication is limited, and environment features may be sparsely- distributed. In these situations, the path taken by the robot can drastically affect the performance of SLAM, so the robot must plan and act intelligently and efficiently to ensure successful task completion.
This document proposes novel research in belief-space planning for active visual SLAM in underwater environments. Our motivating application is ship hull inspection with an autonomous underwater robot. We design a Gaussian belief-space planning formulation that accounts for the randomness of the loop-closure measurements in visual SLAM and serves as the mathematical foundation for the research in this thesis. Combining this planning formulation with sampling-based techniques, we efficiently search for loop-closure actions throughout the environment and present a two-step approach for selecting revisit actions that results in an opportunistic active SLAM framework. The proposed active SLAM method is tested in hybrid simulations and real-world field trials of an underwater robot performing inspections of a physical modeling basin and a U.S. Coast Guard cutter.
To reduce computational load, we present research into efficient planning by compressing the representation and examining the structure of the underlying SLAM system. We propose the use of graph sparsification methods online to reduce complexity by planning with an approximate distribution that represents the original, full pose graph. We also propose the use of the Bayes tree data structure—first introduced for fast inference in SLAM—to perform efficient incremental updates when evaluating candidate plans that are similar. As a final contribution, we design risk-averse objective functions that account for the randomness within our planning formulation. We show that this aversion to uncertainty in the posterior belief leads to desirable and intuitive behavior within active SLAM.PhDMechanical EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/133303/1/schaves_1.pd
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