Aerial reconstructions via probabilistic data fusion

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2013.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (pages 133-136).In this thesis we propose a probabilistic model that incorporates multi-modal noisy measurements: aerial images and Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) to recover scene geometry and appearance in order to build a 3D photo-realistic model of a given scene. In urban environments, these reconstructions have many applications, such as surveillance, and urban planning. The proposed probabilistic model can be viewed as a data fusion model, in which the two data sources complement each other and allow for better results than when only a single one is present. Moreover, this modeling approach has the advantages that it can capture uncertainty in reconstructions, and the ability to incorporate additional scene measurements easily when the sensor models are available. Furthermore, the results obtained with the proposed method are qualitatively comparable to those obtained with traditional structure from motion, despite differences in modeling approach and reconstruction goals. The appearance and geometry trade-off present in the model between the different data sources can be used to obtain a similar (and sometime superior) reconstruction of complex urban scenes with fewer image observations over traditional reconstruction methods. Extending beyond reconstructions, the proposed model has two alluring features: first we are able to determine absolute scale and orientation, and secondly, we are able to detect moving objects. From an implementation standpoint, this thesis has shown how to leverage the power of graphic processing units (GPUs) and parallel programming to allow fast inference. Achieving real time rendering of scenes with hundreds of thousands of geometric primitives and inferring latent appearance, camera pose and geometry in the order of seconds each.by Randi Cabezas.S.M

Robust Dense Mapping for Large-Scale Dynamic Environments

We present a stereo-based dense mapping algorithm for large-scale dynamic urban environments. In contrast to other existing methods, we simultaneously reconstruct the static background, the moving objects, and the potentially moving but currently stationary objects separately, which is desirable for high-level mobile robotic tasks such as path planning in crowded environments. We use both instance-aware semantic segmentation and sparse scene flow to classify objects as either background, moving, or potentially moving, thereby ensuring that the system is able to model objects with the potential to transition from static to dynamic, such as parked cars. Given camera poses estimated from visual odometry, both the background and the (potentially) moving objects are reconstructed separately by fusing the depth maps computed from the stereo input. In addition to visual odometry, sparse scene flow is also used to estimate the 3D motions of the detected moving objects, in order to reconstruct them accurately. A map pruning technique is further developed to improve reconstruction accuracy and reduce memory consumption, leading to increased scalability. We evaluate our system thoroughly on the well-known KITTI dataset. Our system is capable of running on a PC at approximately 2.5Hz, with the primary bottleneck being the instance-aware semantic segmentation, which is a limitation we hope to address in future work. The source code is available from the project website (http://andreibarsan.github.io/dynslam).Comment: Presented at IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 201

SurfelMeshing: Online Surfel-Based Mesh Reconstruction

We address the problem of mesh reconstruction from live RGB-D video, assuming a calibrated camera and poses provided externally (e.g., by a SLAM system). In contrast to most existing approaches, we do not fuse depth measurements in a volume but in a dense surfel cloud. We asynchronously (re)triangulate the smoothed surfels to reconstruct a surface mesh. This novel approach enables to maintain a dense surface representation of the scene during SLAM which can quickly adapt to loop closures. This is possible by deforming the surfel cloud and asynchronously remeshing the surface where necessary. The surfel-based representation also naturally supports strongly varying scan resolution. In particular, it reconstructs colors at the input camera's resolution. Moreover, in contrast to many volumetric approaches, ours can reconstruct thin objects since objects do not need to enclose a volume. We demonstrate our approach in a number of experiments, showing that it produces reconstructions that are competitive with the state-of-the-art, and we discuss its advantages and limitations. The algorithm (excluding loop closure functionality) is available as open source at https://github.com/puzzlepaint/surfelmeshing .Comment: Version accepted to IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligenc

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

Semantic 3D Reconstruction with Finite Element Bases

We propose a novel framework for the discretisation of multi-label problems on arbitrary, continuous domains. Our work bridges the gap between general FEM discretisations, and labeling problems that arise in a variety of computer vision tasks, including for instance those derived from the generalised Potts model. Starting from the popular formulation of labeling as a convex relaxation by functional lifting, we show that FEM discretisation is valid for the most general case, where the regulariser is anisotropic and non-metric. While our findings are generic and applicable to different vision problems, we demonstrate their practical implementation in the context of semantic 3D reconstruction, where such regularisers have proved particularly beneficial. The proposed FEM approach leads to a smaller memory footprint as well as faster computation, and it constitutes a very simple way to enable variable, adaptive resolution within the same model

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Tohoku University岡谷貴之課

KEYFRAME-BASED VISUAL-INERTIAL SLAM USING NONLINEAR OPTIMIZATION

Abstract—The fusion of visual and inertial cues has become popular in robotics due to the complementary nature of the two sensing modalities. While most fusion strategies to date rely on filtering schemes, the visual robotics community has recently turned to non-linear optimization approaches for tasks such as visual Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM), following the discovery that this comes with significant advantages in quality of performance and computational complexity. Following this trend, we present a novel approach to tightly integrate visual measurements with readings from an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) in SLAM. An IMU error term is integrated with the landmark reprojection error in a fully probabilistic manner, resulting to a joint non-linear cost function to be optimized. Employing the powerful concept of ‘keyframes ’ we partially marginalize old states to maintain a bounded-sized optimization window, ensuring real-time operation. Comparing against both vision-only and loosely-coupled visual-inertial algorithms, our experiments confirm the benefits of tight fusion in terms of accuracy and robustness. I