11,024 research outputs found
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
VNect: Real-time 3D Human Pose Estimation with a Single RGB Camera
We present the first real-time method to capture the full global 3D skeletal
pose of a human in a stable, temporally consistent manner using a single RGB
camera. Our method combines a new convolutional neural network (CNN) based pose
regressor with kinematic skeleton fitting. Our novel fully-convolutional pose
formulation regresses 2D and 3D joint positions jointly in real time and does
not require tightly cropped input frames. A real-time kinematic skeleton
fitting method uses the CNN output to yield temporally stable 3D global pose
reconstructions on the basis of a coherent kinematic skeleton. This makes our
approach the first monocular RGB method usable in real-time applications such
as 3D character control---thus far, the only monocular methods for such
applications employed specialized RGB-D cameras. Our method's accuracy is
quantitatively on par with the best offline 3D monocular RGB pose estimation
methods. Our results are qualitatively comparable to, and sometimes better
than, results from monocular RGB-D approaches, such as the Kinect. However, we
show that our approach is more broadly applicable than RGB-D solutions, i.e. it
works for outdoor scenes, community videos, and low quality commodity RGB
cameras.Comment: Accepted to SIGGRAPH 201
Improving Fiber Alignment in HARDI by Combining Contextual PDE Flow with Constrained Spherical Deconvolution
We propose two strategies to improve the quality of tractography results
computed from diffusion weighted magnetic resonance imaging (DW-MRI) data. Both
methods are based on the same PDE framework, defined in the coupled space of
positions and orientations, associated with a stochastic process describing the
enhancement of elongated structures while preserving crossing structures. In
the first method we use the enhancement PDE for contextual regularization of a
fiber orientation distribution (FOD) that is obtained on individual voxels from
high angular resolution diffusion imaging (HARDI) data via constrained
spherical deconvolution (CSD). Thereby we improve the FOD as input for
subsequent tractography. Secondly, we introduce the fiber to bundle coherence
(FBC), a measure for quantification of fiber alignment. The FBC is computed
from a tractography result using the same PDE framework and provides a
criterion for removing the spurious fibers. We validate the proposed
combination of CSD and enhancement on phantom data and on human data, acquired
with different scanning protocols. On the phantom data we find that PDE
enhancements improve both local metrics and global metrics of tractography
results, compared to CSD without enhancements. On the human data we show that
the enhancements allow for a better reconstruction of crossing fiber bundles
and they reduce the variability of the tractography output with respect to the
acquisition parameters. Finally, we show that both the enhancement of the FODs
and the use of the FBC measure on the tractography improve the stability with
respect to different stochastic realizations of probabilistic tractography.
This is shown in a clinical application: the reconstruction of the optic
radiation for epilepsy surgery planning
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