23,863 research outputs found
Attention and Anticipation in Fast Visual-Inertial Navigation
We study a Visual-Inertial Navigation (VIN) problem in which a robot needs to
estimate its state using an on-board camera and an inertial sensor, without any
prior knowledge of the external environment. We consider the case in which the
robot can allocate limited resources to VIN, due to tight computational
constraints. Therefore, we answer the following question: under limited
resources, what are the most relevant visual cues to maximize the performance
of visual-inertial navigation? Our approach has four key ingredients. First, it
is task-driven, in that the selection of the visual cues is guided by a metric
quantifying the VIN performance. Second, it exploits the notion of
anticipation, since it uses a simplified model for forward-simulation of robot
dynamics, predicting the utility of a set of visual cues over a future time
horizon. Third, it is efficient and easy to implement, since it leads to a
greedy algorithm for the selection of the most relevant visual cues. Fourth, it
provides formal performance guarantees: we leverage submodularity to prove that
the greedy selection cannot be far from the optimal (combinatorial) selection.
Simulations and real experiments on agile drones show that our approach ensures
state-of-the-art VIN performance while maintaining a lean processing time. In
the easy scenarios, our approach outperforms appearance-based feature selection
in terms of localization errors. In the most challenging scenarios, it enables
accurate visual-inertial navigation while appearance-based feature selection
fails to track robot's motion during aggressive maneuvers.Comment: 20 pages, 7 figures, 2 table
A multi-projector CAVE system with commodity hardware and gesture-based interaction
Spatially-immersive systems such as CAVEs provide users with surrounding worlds by projecting 3D models on multiple screens around the viewer. Compared to alternative immersive systems such as HMDs, CAVE systems are a powerful tool for collaborative inspection of virtual environments due to better use of peripheral vision, less sensitivity to tracking errors, and higher communication possibilities among users. Unfortunately, traditional CAVE setups require sophisticated equipment including stereo-ready projectors and tracking systems with high acquisition and maintenance costs. In this paper we present the design and construction of a passive-stereo, four-wall CAVE system based on commodity hardware. Our system works with any mix of a wide range of projector models that can be replaced independently at any time, and achieves high resolution and brightness at a minimum cost. The key ingredients of our CAVE are a self-calibration approach that guarantees continuity across the screen, as well as a gesture-based interaction approach based on a clever
combination of skeletal data from multiple Kinect sensors.Preprin
Self-diffusion in two-dimensional hard ellipsoid suspensions
We studied the self-diffusion of colloidal ellipsoids in a monolayer near a
flat wall by video microscopy. The image processing algorithm can track the
positions and orientations of ellipsoids with sub-pixel resolution. The
translational and rotational diffusions were measured in both the lab frame and
the body frame along the long and short axes. The long-time and short-time
diffusion coefficients of translational and rotational motions were measured as
functions of the particle concentration. We observed sub-diffusive behavior in
the intermediate time regime due to the caging of neighboring particles. Both
the beginning and the ending times of the intermediate regime exhibit power-law
dependence on concentration. The long-time and short-time diffusion
anisotropies change non-monotonically with concentration and reach minima in
the semi-dilute regime because the motions along long axes are caged at lower
concentrations than the motions along short axes. The effective diffusion
coefficients change with time t as a linear function of (lnt)/t for the
translational and rotational diffusions at various particle densities. This
indicates that their relaxation functions decay according to 1/t which provides
new challenges in theory. The effects of coupling between rotational and
translational Brownian motions were demonstrated and the two time scales
corresponding to anisotropic particle shape and anisotropic neighboring
environment were measured
FollowMe: Efficient Online Min-Cost Flow Tracking with Bounded Memory and Computation
One of the most popular approaches to multi-target tracking is
tracking-by-detection. Current min-cost flow algorithms which solve the data
association problem optimally have three main drawbacks: they are
computationally expensive, they assume that the whole video is given as a
batch, and they scale badly in memory and computation with the length of the
video sequence. In this paper, we address each of these issues, resulting in a
computationally and memory-bounded solution. First, we introduce a dynamic
version of the successive shortest-path algorithm which solves the data
association problem optimally while reusing computation, resulting in
significantly faster inference than standard solvers. Second, we address the
optimal solution to the data association problem when dealing with an incoming
stream of data (i.e., online setting). Finally, we present our main
contribution which is an approximate online solution with bounded memory and
computation which is capable of handling videos of arbitrarily length while
performing tracking in real time. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our
algorithms on the KITTI and PETS2009 benchmarks and show state-of-the-art
performance, while being significantly faster than existing solvers
Flight Dynamics-based Recovery of a UAV Trajectory using Ground Cameras
We propose a new method to estimate the 6-dof trajectory of a flying object
such as a quadrotor UAV within a 3D airspace monitored using multiple fixed
ground cameras. It is based on a new structure from motion formulation for the
3D reconstruction of a single moving point with known motion dynamics. Our main
contribution is a new bundle adjustment procedure which in addition to
optimizing the camera poses, regularizes the point trajectory using a prior
based on motion dynamics (or specifically flight dynamics). Furthermore, we can
infer the underlying control input sent to the UAV's autopilot that determined
its flight trajectory.
Our method requires neither perfect single-view tracking nor appearance
matching across views. For robustness, we allow the tracker to generate
multiple detections per frame in each video. The true detections and the data
association across videos is estimated using robust multi-view triangulation
and subsequently refined during our bundle adjustment procedure. Quantitative
evaluation on simulated data and experiments on real videos from indoor and
outdoor scenes demonstrates the effectiveness of our method
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