13,137 research outputs found
Gravitational Clustering: A Simple, Robust and Adaptive Approach for Distributed Networks
Distributed signal processing for wireless sensor networks enables that
different devices cooperate to solve different signal processing tasks. A
crucial first step is to answer the question: who observes what? Recently,
several distributed algorithms have been proposed, which frame the
signal/object labelling problem in terms of cluster analysis after extracting
source-specific features, however, the number of clusters is assumed to be
known. We propose a new method called Gravitational Clustering (GC) to
adaptively estimate the time-varying number of clusters based on a set of
feature vectors. The key idea is to exploit the physical principle of
gravitational force between mass units: streaming-in feature vectors are
considered as mass units of fixed position in the feature space, around which
mobile mass units are injected at each time instant. The cluster enumeration
exploits the fact that the highest attraction on the mobile mass units is
exerted by regions with a high density of feature vectors, i.e., gravitational
clusters. By sharing estimates among neighboring nodes via a
diffusion-adaptation scheme, cooperative and distributed cluster enumeration is
achieved. Numerical experiments concerning robustness against outliers,
convergence and computational complexity are conducted. The application in a
distributed cooperative multi-view camera network illustrates the applicability
to real-world problems.Comment: 12 pages, 9 figure
Past, Present, and Future of Simultaneous Localization And Mapping: Towards the Robust-Perception Age
Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM)consists in the concurrent
construction of a model of the environment (the map), and the estimation of the
state of the robot moving within it. The SLAM community has made astonishing
progress over the last 30 years, enabling large-scale real-world applications,
and witnessing a steady transition of this technology to industry. We survey
the current state of SLAM. We start by presenting what is now the de-facto
standard formulation for SLAM. We then review related work, covering a broad
set of topics including robustness and scalability in long-term mapping, metric
and semantic representations for mapping, theoretical performance guarantees,
active SLAM and exploration, and other new frontiers. This paper simultaneously
serves as a position paper and tutorial to those who are users of SLAM. By
looking at the published research with a critical eye, we delineate open
challenges and new research issues, that still deserve careful scientific
investigation. The paper also contains the authors' take on two questions that
often animate discussions during robotics conferences: Do robots need SLAM? and
Is SLAM solved
Articulated Clinician Detection Using 3D Pictorial Structures on RGB-D Data
Reliable human pose estimation (HPE) is essential to many clinical
applications, such as surgical workflow analysis, radiation safety monitoring
and human-robot cooperation. Proposed methods for the operating room (OR) rely
either on foreground estimation using a multi-camera system, which is a
challenge in real ORs due to color similarities and frequent illumination
changes, or on wearable sensors or markers, which are invasive and therefore
difficult to introduce in the room. Instead, we propose a novel approach based
on Pictorial Structures (PS) and on RGB-D data, which can be easily deployed in
real ORs. We extend the PS framework in two ways. First, we build robust and
discriminative part detectors using both color and depth images. We also
present a novel descriptor for depth images, called histogram of depth
differences (HDD). Second, we extend PS to 3D by proposing 3D pairwise
constraints and a new method that makes exact inference tractable. Our approach
is evaluated for pose estimation and clinician detection on a challenging RGB-D
dataset recorded in a busy operating room during live surgeries. We conduct
series of experiments to study the different part detectors in conjunction with
the various 2D or 3D pairwise constraints. Our comparisons demonstrate that 3D
PS with RGB-D part detectors significantly improves the results in a visually
challenging operating environment.Comment: The supplementary video is available at https://youtu.be/iabbGSqRSg
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