48,819 research outputs found
Vision-model-based Real-time Localization of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle for Autonomous Structure Inspection under GPS-denied Environment
UAVs have been widely used in visual inspections of buildings, bridges and
other structures. In either outdoor autonomous or semi-autonomous flights
missions strong GPS signal is vital for UAV to locate its own positions.
However, strong GPS signal is not always available, and it can degrade or fully
loss underneath large structures or close to power lines, which can cause
serious control issues or even UAV crashes. Such limitations highly restricted
the applications of UAV as a routine inspection tool in various domains. In
this paper a vision-model-based real-time self-positioning method is proposed
to support autonomous aerial inspection without the need of GPS support.
Compared to other localization methods that requires additional onboard
sensors, the proposed method uses a single camera to continuously estimate the
inflight poses of UAV. Each step of the proposed method is discussed in detail,
and its performance is tested through an indoor test case.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures, submitted to i3ce 201
Template matching method for the analysis of interstellar cloud structure
The structure of interstellar medium can be characterised at large scales in
terms of its global statistics (e.g. power spectra) and at small scales by the
properties of individual cores. Interest has been increasing in structures at
intermediate scales, resulting in a number of methods being developed for the
analysis of filamentary structures. We describe the application of the generic
template-matching (TM) method to the analysis of maps. Our aim is to show that
it provides a fast and still relatively robust way to identify elongated
structures or other image features. We present the implementation of a TM
algorithm for map analysis. The results are compared against rolling Hough
transform (RHT), one of the methods previously used to identify filamentary
structures. We illustrate the method by applying it to Herschel surface
brightness data. The performance of the TM method is found to be comparable to
that of RHT but TM appears to be more robust regarding the input parameters,
for example, those related to the selected spatial scales. Small modifications
of TM enable one to target structures at different size and intensity levels.
In addition to elongated features, we demonstrate the possibility of using TM
to also identify other types of structures. The TM method is a viable tool for
data quality control, exploratory data analysis, and even quantitative analysis
of structures in image data.Comment: 12 pages, accepted to A&
A convolutional autoencoder approach for mining features in cellular electron cryo-tomograms and weakly supervised coarse segmentation
Cellular electron cryo-tomography enables the 3D visualization of cellular
organization in the near-native state and at submolecular resolution. However,
the contents of cellular tomograms are often complex, making it difficult to
automatically isolate different in situ cellular components. In this paper, we
propose a convolutional autoencoder-based unsupervised approach to provide a
coarse grouping of 3D small subvolumes extracted from tomograms. We demonstrate
that the autoencoder can be used for efficient and coarse characterization of
features of macromolecular complexes and surfaces, such as membranes. In
addition, the autoencoder can be used to detect non-cellular features related
to sample preparation and data collection, such as carbon edges from the grid
and tomogram boundaries. The autoencoder is also able to detect patterns that
may indicate spatial interactions between cellular components. Furthermore, we
demonstrate that our autoencoder can be used for weakly supervised semantic
segmentation of cellular components, requiring a very small amount of manual
annotation.Comment: Accepted by Journal of Structural Biolog
Improving Unsupervised Defect Segmentation by Applying Structural Similarity to Autoencoders
Convolutional autoencoders have emerged as popular methods for unsupervised
defect segmentation on image data. Most commonly, this task is performed by
thresholding a pixel-wise reconstruction error based on an distance.
This procedure, however, leads to large residuals whenever the reconstruction
encompasses slight localization inaccuracies around edges. It also fails to
reveal defective regions that have been visually altered when intensity values
stay roughly consistent. We show that these problems prevent these approaches
from being applied to complex real-world scenarios and that it cannot be easily
avoided by employing more elaborate architectures such as variational or
feature matching autoencoders. We propose to use a perceptual loss function
based on structural similarity which examines inter-dependencies between local
image regions, taking into account luminance, contrast and structural
information, instead of simply comparing single pixel values. It achieves
significant performance gains on a challenging real-world dataset of
nanofibrous materials and a novel dataset of two woven fabrics over the state
of the art approaches for unsupervised defect segmentation that use pixel-wise
reconstruction error metrics
Leveraging Deep Visual Descriptors for Hierarchical Efficient Localization
Many robotics applications require precise pose estimates despite operating
in large and changing environments. This can be addressed by visual
localization, using a pre-computed 3D model of the surroundings. The pose
estimation then amounts to finding correspondences between 2D keypoints in a
query image and 3D points in the model using local descriptors. However,
computational power is often limited on robotic platforms, making this task
challenging in large-scale environments. Binary feature descriptors
significantly speed up this 2D-3D matching, and have become popular in the
robotics community, but also strongly impair the robustness to perceptual
aliasing and changes in viewpoint, illumination and scene structure. In this
work, we propose to leverage recent advances in deep learning to perform an
efficient hierarchical localization. We first localize at the map level using
learned image-wide global descriptors, and subsequently estimate a precise pose
from 2D-3D matches computed in the candidate places only. This restricts the
local search and thus allows to efficiently exploit powerful non-binary
descriptors usually dismissed on resource-constrained devices. Our approach
results in state-of-the-art localization performance while running in real-time
on a popular mobile platform, enabling new prospects for robotics research.Comment: CoRL 2018 Camera-ready (fix typos and update citations
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