Online Visual Robot Tracking and Identification using Deep LSTM Networks

Collaborative robots working on a common task are necessary for many applications. One of the challenges for achieving collaboration in a team of robots is mutual tracking and identification. We present a novel pipeline for online visionbased detection, tracking and identification of robots with a known and identical appearance. Our method runs in realtime on the limited hardware of the observer robot. Unlike previous works addressing robot tracking and identification, we use a data-driven approach based on recurrent neural networks to learn relations between sequential inputs and outputs. We formulate the data association problem as multiple classification problems. A deep LSTM network was trained on a simulated dataset and fine-tuned on small set of real data. Experiments on two challenging datasets, one synthetic and one real, which include long-term occlusions, show promising results.Comment: IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), Vancouver, Canada, 2017. IROS RoboCup Best Paper Awar

Vehicle detection and tracking using homography-based plane rectification and particle filtering

This paper presents a full system for vehicle detection and tracking in non-stationary settings based on computer vision. The method proposed for vehicle detection exploits the geometrical relations between the elements in the scene so that moving objects (i.e., vehicles) can be detected by analyzing motion parallax. Namely, the homography of the road plane between successive images is computed. Most remarkably, a novel probabilistic framework based on Kalman filtering is presented for reliable and accurate homography estimation. The estimated homography is used for image alignment, which in turn allows to detect the moving vehicles in the image. Tracking of vehicles is performed on the basis of a multidimensional particle filter, which also manages the exit and entries of objects. The filter involves a mixture likelihood model that allows a better adaptation of the particles to the observed measurements. The system is specially designed for highway environments, where it has been proven to yield excellent results

Optical techniques for 3D surface reconstruction in computer-assisted laparoscopic surgery

One of the main challenges for computer-assisted surgery (CAS) is to determine the intra-opera- tive morphology and motion of soft-tissues. This information is prerequisite to the registration of multi-modal patient-specific data for enhancing the surgeon’s navigation capabilites by observ- ing beyond exposed tissue surfaces and for providing intelligent control of robotic-assisted in- struments. In minimally invasive surgery (MIS), optical techniques are an increasingly attractive approach for in vivo 3D reconstruction of the soft-tissue surface geometry. This paper reviews the state-of-the-art methods for optical intra-operative 3D reconstruction in laparoscopic surgery and discusses the technical challenges and future perspectives towards clinical translation. With the recent paradigm shift of surgical practice towards MIS and new developments in 3D opti- cal imaging, this is a timely discussion about technologies that could facilitate complex CAS procedures in dynamic and deformable anatomical regions