1,004 research outputs found
GOGMA: Globally-Optimal Gaussian Mixture Alignment
Gaussian mixture alignment is a family of approaches that are frequently used
for robustly solving the point-set registration problem. However, since they
use local optimisation, they are susceptible to local minima and can only
guarantee local optimality. Consequently, their accuracy is strongly dependent
on the quality of the initialisation. This paper presents the first
globally-optimal solution to the 3D rigid Gaussian mixture alignment problem
under the L2 distance between mixtures. The algorithm, named GOGMA, employs a
branch-and-bound approach to search the space of 3D rigid motions SE(3),
guaranteeing global optimality regardless of the initialisation. The geometry
of SE(3) was used to find novel upper and lower bounds for the objective
function and local optimisation was integrated into the scheme to accelerate
convergence without voiding the optimality guarantee. The evaluation
empirically supported the optimality proof and showed that the method performed
much more robustly on two challenging datasets than an existing
globally-optimal registration solution.Comment: Manuscript in press 2016 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and
Pattern Recognitio
GASP : Geometric Association with Surface Patches
A fundamental challenge to sensory processing tasks in perception and
robotics is the problem of obtaining data associations across views. We present
a robust solution for ascertaining potentially dense surface patch (superpixel)
associations, requiring just range information. Our approach involves
decomposition of a view into regularized surface patches. We represent them as
sequences expressing geometry invariantly over their superpixel neighborhoods,
as uniquely consistent partial orderings. We match these representations
through an optimal sequence comparison metric based on the Damerau-Levenshtein
distance - enabling robust association with quadratic complexity (in contrast
to hitherto employed joint matching formulations which are NP-complete). The
approach is able to perform under wide baselines, heavy rotations, partial
overlaps, significant occlusions and sensor noise.
The technique does not require any priors -- motion or otherwise, and does
not make restrictive assumptions on scene structure and sensor movement. It
does not require appearance -- is hence more widely applicable than appearance
reliant methods, and invulnerable to related ambiguities such as textureless or
aliased content. We present promising qualitative and quantitative results
under diverse settings, along with comparatives with popular approaches based
on range as well as RGB-D data.Comment: International Conference on 3D Vision, 201
Robust and Optimal Methods for Geometric Sensor Data Alignment
Geometric sensor data alignment - the problem of finding the
rigid transformation that correctly aligns two sets of sensor
data without prior knowledge of how the data correspond - is a
fundamental task in computer vision and robotics. It is
inconvenient then that outliers and non-convexity are inherent to
the problem and present significant challenges for alignment
algorithms. Outliers are highly prevalent in sets of sensor data,
particularly when the sets overlap incompletely. Despite this,
many alignment objective functions are not robust to outliers,
leading to erroneous alignments. In addition, alignment problems
are highly non-convex, a property arising from the objective
function and the transformation. While finding a local optimum
may not be difficult, finding the global optimum is a hard
optimisation problem. These key challenges have not been fully
and jointly resolved in the existing literature, and so there is
a need for robust and optimal solutions to alignment problems.
Hence the objective of this thesis is to develop tractable
algorithms for geometric sensor data alignment that are robust to
outliers and not susceptible to spurious local optima.
This thesis makes several significant contributions to the
geometric alignment literature, founded on new insights into
robust alignment and the geometry of transformations. Firstly, a
novel discriminative sensor data representation is proposed that
has better viewpoint invariance than generative models and is
time and memory efficient without sacrificing model fidelity.
Secondly, a novel local optimisation algorithm is developed for
nD-nD geometric alignment under a robust distance measure. It
manifests a wider region of convergence and a greater robustness
to outliers and sampling artefacts than other local optimisation
algorithms. Thirdly, the first optimal solution for 3D-3D
geometric alignment with an inherently robust objective function
is proposed. It outperforms other geometric alignment algorithms
on challenging datasets due to its guaranteed optimality and
outlier robustness, and has an efficient parallel implementation.
Fourthly, the first optimal solution for 2D-3D geometric
alignment with an inherently robust objective function is
proposed. It outperforms existing approaches on challenging
datasets, reliably finding the global optimum, and has an
efficient parallel implementation. Finally, another optimal
solution is developed for 2D-3D geometric alignment, using a
robust surface alignment measure.
Ultimately, robust and optimal methods, such as those in this
thesis, are necessary to reliably find accurate solutions to
geometric sensor data alignment problems
Using diffusion distances for flexible molecular shape comparison
<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Many molecules are flexible and undergo significant shape deformation as part of their function, and yet most existing molecular shape comparison (MSC) methods treat them as rigid bodies, which may lead to incorrect shape recognition.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>In this paper, we present a new shape descriptor, named Diffusion Distance Shape Descriptor (DDSD), for comparing 3D shapes of flexible molecules. The diffusion distance in our work is considered as an average length of paths connecting two landmark points on the molecular shape in a sense of inner distances. The diffusion distance is robust to flexible shape deformation, in particular to topological changes, and it reflects well the molecular structure and deformation without explicit decomposition. Our DDSD is stored as a histogram which is a probability distribution of diffusion distances between all sample point pairs on the molecular surface. Finally, the problem of flexible MSC is reduced to comparison of DDSD histograms.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>We illustrate that DDSD is insensitive to shape deformation of flexible molecules and more effective at capturing molecular structures than traditional shape descriptors. The presented algorithm is robust and does not require any prior knowledge of the flexible regions.</p
Robust Temporally Coherent Laplacian Protrusion Segmentation of 3D Articulated Bodies
In motion analysis and understanding it is important to be able to fit a
suitable model or structure to the temporal series of observed data, in order
to describe motion patterns in a compact way, and to discriminate between them.
In an unsupervised context, i.e., no prior model of the moving object(s) is
available, such a structure has to be learned from the data in a bottom-up
fashion. In recent times, volumetric approaches in which the motion is captured
from a number of cameras and a voxel-set representation of the body is built
from the camera views, have gained ground due to attractive features such as
inherent view-invariance and robustness to occlusions. Automatic, unsupervised
segmentation of moving bodies along entire sequences, in a temporally-coherent
and robust way, has the potential to provide a means of constructing a
bottom-up model of the moving body, and track motion cues that may be later
exploited for motion classification. Spectral methods such as locally linear
embedding (LLE) can be useful in this context, as they preserve "protrusions",
i.e., high-curvature regions of the 3D volume, of articulated shapes, while
improving their separation in a lower dimensional space, making them in this
way easier to cluster. In this paper we therefore propose a spectral approach
to unsupervised and temporally-coherent body-protrusion segmentation along time
sequences. Volumetric shapes are clustered in an embedding space, clusters are
propagated in time to ensure coherence, and merged or split to accommodate
changes in the body's topology. Experiments on both synthetic and real
sequences of dense voxel-set data are shown. This supports the ability of the
proposed method to cluster body-parts consistently over time in a totally
unsupervised fashion, its robustness to sampling density and shape quality, and
its potential for bottom-up model constructionComment: 31 pages, 26 figure
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