27 research outputs found
Towards Accurate Camera Geopositioning by Image Matching
In this work, we present a camera geopositioning system based on matching a
query image against a database with panoramic images. For matching, our system
uses memory vectors aggregated from global image descriptors based on
convolutional features to facilitate fast searching in the database. To speed
up searching, a clustering algorithm is used to balance geographical
positioning and computation time. We refine the obtained position from the
query image using a new outlier removal algorithm. The matching of the query
image is obtained with a recall@5 larger than 90% for panorama-to-panorama
matching. We cluster available panoramas from geographically adjacent locations
into a single compact representation and observe computational gains of
approximately 50% at the cost of only a small (approximately 3%) recall loss.
Finally, we present a coordinate estimation algorithm that reduces the median
geopositioning error by up to 20%
Semantic Cross-View Matching
Matching cross-view images is challenging because the appearance and
viewpoints are significantly different. While low-level features based on
gradient orientations or filter responses can drastically vary with such
changes in viewpoint, semantic information of images however shows an invariant
characteristic in this respect. Consequently, semantically labeled regions can
be used for performing cross-view matching. In this paper, we therefore explore
this idea and propose an automatic method for detecting and representing the
semantic information of an RGB image with the goal of performing cross-view
matching with a (non-RGB) geographic information system (GIS). A segmented
image forms the input to our system with segments assigned to semantic concepts
such as traffic signs, lakes, roads, foliage, etc. We design a descriptor to
robustly capture both, the presence of semantic concepts and the spatial layout
of those segments. Pairwise distances between the descriptors extracted from
the GIS map and the query image are then used to generate a shortlist of the
most promising locations with similar semantic concepts in a consistent spatial
layout. An experimental evaluation with challenging query images and a large
urban area shows promising results
Cross-View Image Matching for Geo-localization in Urban Environments
In this paper, we address the problem of cross-view image geo-localization.
Specifically, we aim to estimate the GPS location of a query street view image
by finding the matching images in a reference database of geo-tagged bird's eye
view images, or vice versa. To this end, we present a new framework for
cross-view image geo-localization by taking advantage of the tremendous success
of deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in image classification and object
detection. First, we employ the Faster R-CNN to detect buildings in the query
and reference images. Next, for each building in the query image, we retrieve
the nearest neighbors from the reference buildings using a Siamese network
trained on both positive matching image pairs and negative pairs. To find the
correct NN for each query building, we develop an efficient multiple nearest
neighbors matching method based on dominant sets. We evaluate the proposed
framework on a new dataset that consists of pairs of street view and bird's eye
view images. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves better
geo-localization accuracy than other approaches and is able to generalize to
images at unseen locations
AgriColMap: Aerial-Ground Collaborative 3D Mapping for Precision Farming
The combination of aerial survey capabilities of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles
with targeted intervention abilities of agricultural Unmanned Ground Vehicles
can significantly improve the effectiveness of robotic systems applied to
precision agriculture. In this context, building and updating a common map of
the field is an essential but challenging task. The maps built using robots of
different types show differences in size, resolution and scale, the associated
geolocation data may be inaccurate and biased, while the repetitiveness of both
visual appearance and geometric structures found within agricultural contexts
render classical map merging techniques ineffective. In this paper we propose
AgriColMap, a novel map registration pipeline that leverages a grid-based
multimodal environment representation which includes a vegetation index map and
a Digital Surface Model. We cast the data association problem between maps
built from UAVs and UGVs as a multimodal, large displacement dense optical flow
estimation. The dominant, coherent flows, selected using a voting scheme, are
used as point-to-point correspondences to infer a preliminary non-rigid
alignment between the maps. A final refinement is then performed, by exploiting
only meaningful parts of the registered maps. We evaluate our system using real
world data for 3 fields with different crop species. The results show that our
method outperforms several state of the art map registration and matching
techniques by a large margin, and has a higher tolerance to large initial
misalignments. We release an implementation of the proposed approach along with
the acquired datasets with this paper.Comment: Published in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, 201