UAMD-Net: A Unified Adaptive Multimodal Neural Network for Dense Depth Completion

Depth prediction is a critical problem in robotics applications especially autonomous driving. Generally, depth prediction based on binocular stereo matching and fusion of monocular image and laser point cloud are two mainstream methods. However, the former usually suffers from overfitting while building cost volume, and the latter has a limited generalization due to the lack of geometric constraint. To solve these problems, we propose a novel multimodal neural network, namely UAMD-Net, for dense depth completion based on fusion of binocular stereo matching and the weak constrain from the sparse point clouds. Specifically, the sparse point clouds are converted to sparse depth map and sent to the multimodal feature encoder (MFE) with binocular image, constructing a cross-modal cost volume. Then, it will be further processed by the multimodal feature aggregator (MFA) and the depth regression layer. Furthermore, the existing multimodal methods ignore the problem of modal dependence, that is, the network will not work when a certain modal input has a problem. Therefore, we propose a new training strategy called Modal-dropout which enables the network to be adaptively trained with multiple modal inputs and inference with specific modal inputs. Benefiting from the flexible network structure and adaptive training method, our proposed network can realize unified training under various modal input conditions. Comprehensive experiments conducted on KITTI depth completion benchmark demonstrate that our method produces robust results and outperforms other state-of-the-art methods.Comment: 11 pages, 4 figure

Generating Absolute-Scale Point Cloud Data of Built Infrastructure Scenes Using a Monocular Camera Setting

The global scale of Point Cloud Data (PCD) generated through monocular photo/videogrammetry is unknown, and can be calculated using at least one known dimension of the scene. Measuring one or more dimensions for this purpose induces a manual step in the 3D reconstruction process; this increases the effort and reduces the speed of reconstructing scenes, and induces substantial human error in the process due to the high level of measurement accuracy needed. Other ways of measuring such dimensions are based on acquiring additional information by either using extra sensors or specific classes of objects existing in the scene; we found that these solutions are not simple, cost effective or general enough to be considered practical for reconstructing both indoor and outdoor built infrastructure scenes. To address the issue, in this paper, we propose a novel method for automatically calculating the absolute scale of built infrastructure PCD. We use a pre-measured cube for outdoor scenes and a sheet of paper for indoor environments as the calibration patterns. Assuming that the dimensions of these objects are known, the proposed method extracts the objects’ corner points in 2D video frames using a novel algorithm. The extracted corner points are then matched between the consecutive frames. Finally, the corresponding corner points are reconstructed along with other features of the scenes to determine the real world scale. To evaluate the performance of the method, ten indoor and ten outdoor cases were selected and the absolute-scale PCD for each case was computed. Results illustrated the proposed algorithm is able to reconstruct the predefined objects with a high success rate while the generated absolute scale PCD is sufficiently accurate.This is the accepted manuscript. The final version is available from ASCE at http://dx.doi.org/10.1061/(ASCE)CP.1943-5487.000041

Intelligent multi-sensor integrations

Growth in the intelligence of space systems requires the use and integration of data from multiple sensors. Generic tools are being developed for extracting and integrating information obtained from multiple sources. The full spectrum is addressed for issues ranging from data acquisition, to characterization of sensor data, to adaptive systems for utilizing the data. In particular, there are three major aspects to the project, multisensor processing, an adaptive approach to object recognition, and distributed sensor system integration

OmniDepth: Dense Depth Estimation for Indoors Spherical Panoramas.

Recent work on depth estimation up to now has only focused on projective images ignoring 360o content which is now increasingly and more easily produced. We show that monocular depth estimation models trained on traditional images produce sub-optimal results on omnidirectional images, showcasing the need for training directly on 360o datasets, which however, are hard to acquire. In this work, we circumvent the challenges associated with acquiring high quality 360o datasets with ground truth depth annotations, by re-using recently released large scale 3D datasets and re-purposing them to 360o via rendering. This dataset, which is considerably larger than similar projective datasets, is publicly offered to the community to enable future research in this direction. We use this dataset to learn in an end-to-end fashion the task of depth estimation from 360o images. We show promising results in our synthesized data as well as in unseen realistic images

Final report key contents: main results accomplished by the EU-Funded project IM-CLeVeR - Intrinsically Motivated Cumulative Learning Versatile Robots

This document has the goal of presenting the main scientific and technological achievements of the project IM-CLeVeR. The document is organised as follows: 1. Project executive summary: a brief overview of the project vision, objectives and keywords. 2. Beneficiaries of the project and contacts: list of Teams (partners) of the project, Team Leaders and contacts. 3. Project context and objectives: the vision of the project and its overall objectives 4. Overview of work performed and main results achieved: a one page overview of the main results of the project 5. Overview of main results per partner: a bullet-point list of main results per partners 6. Main achievements in detail, per partner: a throughout explanation of the main results per partner (but including collaboration work), with also reference to the main publications supporting them

NOVEL DENSE STEREO ALGORITHMS FOR HIGH-QUALITY DEPTH ESTIMATION FROM IMAGES

This dissertation addresses the problem of inferring scene depth information from a collection of calibrated images taken from different viewpoints via stereo matching. Although it has been heavily investigated for decades, depth from stereo remains a long-standing challenge and popular research topic for several reasons. First of all, in order to be of practical use for many real-time applications such as autonomous driving, accurate depth estimation in real-time is of great importance and one of the core challenges in stereo. Second, for applications such as 3D reconstruction and view synthesis, high-quality depth estimation is crucial to achieve photo realistic results. However, due to the matching ambiguities, accurate dense depth estimates are difficult to achieve. Last but not least, most stereo algorithms rely on identification of corresponding points among images and only work effectively when scenes are Lambertian. For non-Lambertian surfaces, the brightness constancy assumption is no longer valid. This dissertation contributes three novel stereo algorithms that are motivated by the specific requirements and limitations imposed by different applications. In addressing high speed depth estimation from images, we present a stereo algorithm that achieves high quality results while maintaining real-time performance. We introduce an adaptive aggregation step in a dynamic-programming framework. Matching costs are aggregated in the vertical direction using a computationally expensive weighting scheme based on color and distance proximity. We utilize the vector processing capability and parallelism in commodity graphics hardware to speed up this process over two orders of magnitude. In addressing high accuracy depth estimation, we present a stereo model that makes use of constraints from points with known depths - the Ground Control Points (GCPs) as referred to in stereo literature. Our formulation explicitly models the influences of GCPs in a Markov Random Field. A novel regularization prior is naturally integrated into a global inference framework in a principled way using the Bayes rule. Our probabilistic framework allows GCPs to be obtained from various modalities and provides a natural way to integrate information from various sensors. In addressing non-Lambertian reflectance, we introduce a new invariant for stereo correspondence which allows completely arbitrary scene reflectance (bidirectional reflectance distribution functions - BRDFs). This invariant can be used to formulate a rank constraint on stereo matching when the scene is observed by several lighting configurations in which only the lighting intensity varies

INTERMEDIATE VIEW RECONSTRUCTION FOR MULTISCOPIC 3D DISPLAY

This thesis focuses on Intermediate View Reconstruction (IVR) which generates additional images from the available stereo images. The main application of IVR is to generate the content of multiscopic 3D displays, and it can be applied to generate different viewpoints to Free-viewpoint TV (FTV). Although IVR is considered a good approach to generate additional images, there are some problems with the reconstruction process, such as detecting and handling the occlusion areas, preserving the discontinuity at edges, and reducing image artifices through formation of the texture of the intermediate image. The occlusion area is defined as the visibility of such an area in one image and its disappearance in the other one. Solving IVR problems is considered a significant challenge for researchers. In this thesis, several novel algorithms have been specifically designed to solve IVR challenges by employing them in a highly robust intermediate view reconstruction algorithm. Computer simulation and experimental results confirm the importance of occluded areas in IVR. Therefore, we propose a novel occlusion detection algorithm and another novel algorithm to Inpaint those areas. Then, these proposed algorithms are employed in a novel occlusion-aware intermediate view reconstruction that finds an intermediate image with a given disparity between two input images. This novelty is addressed by adding occlusion awareness to the reconstruction algorithm and proposing three quality improvement techniques to reduce image artifices: filling the re-sampling holes, removing ghost contours, and handling the disocclusion area. We compared the proposed algorithms to the previously well-known algorithms on each field qualitatively and quantitatively. The obtained results show that our algorithms are superior to the previous well-known algorithms. The performance of the proposed reconstruction algorithm is tested under 13 real images and 13 synthetic images. Moreover, analysis of a human-trial experiment conducted with 21 participants confirmed that the reconstructed images from our proposed algorithm have very high quality compared with the reconstructed images from the other existing algorithms