Fast, Accurate Thin-Structure Obstacle Detection for Autonomous Mobile Robots

Safety is paramount for mobile robotic platforms such as self-driving cars and unmanned aerial vehicles. This work is devoted to a task that is indispensable for safety yet was largely overlooked in the past -- detecting obstacles that are of very thin structures, such as wires, cables and tree branches. This is a challenging problem, as thin objects can be problematic for active sensors such as lidar and sonar and even for stereo cameras. In this work, we propose to use video sequences for thin obstacle detection. We represent obstacles with edges in the video frames, and reconstruct them in 3D using efficient edge-based visual odometry techniques. We provide both a monocular camera solution and a stereo camera solution. The former incorporates Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) data to solve scale ambiguity, while the latter enjoys a novel, purely vision-based solution. Experiments demonstrated that the proposed methods are fast and able to detect thin obstacles robustly and accurately under various conditions.Comment: Appeared at IEEE CVPR 2017 Workshop on Embedded Visio

Rapid Online Analysis of Local Feature Detectors and Their Complementarity

A vision system that can assess its own performance and take appropriate actions online to maximize its effectiveness would be a step towards achieving the long-cherished goal of imitating humans. This paper proposes a method for performing an online performance analysis of local feature detectors, the primary stage of many practical vision systems. It advocates the spatial distribution of local image features as a good performance indicator and presents a metric that can be calculated rapidly, concurs with human visual assessments and is complementary to existing offline measures such as repeatability. The metric is shown to provide a measure of complementarity for combinations of detectors, correctly reflecting the underlying principles of individual detectors. Qualitative results on well-established datasets for several state-of-the-art detectors are presented based on the proposed measure. Using a hypothesis testing approach and a newly-acquired, larger image database, statistically-significant performance differences are identified. Different detector pairs and triplets are examined quantitatively and the results provide a useful guideline for combining detectors in applications that require a reasonable spatial distribution of image features. A principled framework for combining feature detectors in these applications is also presented. Timing results reveal the potential of the metric for online applications. © 2013 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland

Scene extraction in motion pictures

This paper addresses the challenge of bridging the semantic gap between the rich meaning users desire when they query to locate and browse media and the shallowness of media descriptions that can be computed in today\u27s content management systems. To facilitate high-level semantics-based content annotation and interpretation, we tackle the problem of automatic decomposition of motion pictures into meaningful story units, namely scenes. Since a scene is a complicated and subjective concept, we first propose guidelines from fill production to determine when a scene change occurs. We then investigate different rules and conventions followed as part of Fill Grammar that would guide and shape an algorithmic solution for determining a scene. Two different techniques using intershot analysis are proposed as solutions in this paper. In addition, we present different refinement mechanisms, such as film-punctuation detection founded on Film Grammar, to further improve the results. These refinement techniques demonstrate significant improvements in overall performance. Furthermore, we analyze errors in the context of film-production techniques, which offer useful insights into the limitations of our method

Guided Filtering based Pyramidal Stereo Matching for Unrectified Images

Stereo matching deals with recovering quantitative depth information from a set of input images, based on the visual disparity between corresponding points. Generally most of the algorithms assume that the processed images are rectified. As robotics becomes popular, conducting stereo matching in the context of cloth manipulation, such as obtaining the disparity map of the garments from the two cameras of the cloth folding robot, is useful and challenging. This is resulted from the fact of the high efficiency, accuracy and low memory requirement under the usage of high resolution images in order to capture the details (e.g. cloth wrinkles) for the given application (e.g. cloth folding). Meanwhile, the images can be unrectified. Therefore, we propose to adapt guided filtering algorithm into the pyramidical stereo matching framework that works directly for unrectified images. To evaluate the proposed unrectified stereo matching in terms of accuracy, we present three datasets that are suited to especially the characteristics of the task of cloth manipulations. By com- paring the proposed algorithm with two baseline algorithms on those three datasets, we demonstrate that our proposed approach is accurate, efficient and requires low memory. This also shows that rather than relying on image rectification, directly applying stereo matching through the unrectified images can be also quite effective and meanwhile efficien

What makes for effective detection proposals?

Current top performing object detectors employ detection proposals to guide the search for objects, thereby avoiding exhaustive sliding window search across images. Despite the popularity and widespread use of detection proposals, it is unclear which trade-offs are made when using them during object detection. We provide an in-depth analysis of twelve proposal methods along with four baselines regarding proposal repeatability, ground truth annotation recall on PASCAL, ImageNet, and MS COCO, and their impact on DPM, R-CNN, and Fast R-CNN detection performance. Our analysis shows that for object detection improving proposal localisation accuracy is as important as improving recall. We introduce a novel metric, the average recall (AR), which rewards both high recall and good localisation and correlates surprisingly well with detection performance. Our findings show common strengths and weaknesses of existing methods, and provide insights and metrics for selecting and tuning proposal methods.Comment: TPAMI final version, duplicate proposals removed in experiment