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

LiveCap: Real-time Human Performance Capture from Monocular Video

We present the first real-time human performance capture approach that reconstructs dense, space-time coherent deforming geometry of entire humans in general everyday clothing from just a single RGB video. We propose a novel two-stage analysis-by-synthesis optimization whose formulation and implementation are designed for high performance. In the first stage, a skinned template model is jointly fitted to background subtracted input video, 2D and 3D skeleton joint positions found using a deep neural network, and a set of sparse facial landmark detections. In the second stage, dense non-rigid 3D deformations of skin and even loose apparel are captured based on a novel real-time capable algorithm for non-rigid tracking using dense photometric and silhouette constraints. Our novel energy formulation leverages automatically identified material regions on the template to model the differing non-rigid deformation behavior of skin and apparel. The two resulting non-linear optimization problems per-frame are solved with specially-tailored data-parallel Gauss-Newton solvers. In order to achieve real-time performance of over 25Hz, we design a pipelined parallel architecture using the CPU and two commodity GPUs. Our method is the first real-time monocular approach for full-body performance capture. Our method yields comparable accuracy with off-line performance capture techniques, while being orders of magnitude faster

Digital Video Stabilization

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

Multi-Person Tracking By Multi-Scale Detection in Basketball Scenarios

Tracking data is a powerful tool for basketball teams in order to extract advanced semantic information and statistics that might lead to a performance boost. However, multi-person tracking is a challenging task to solve in single-camera video sequences, given the frequent occlusions and cluttering that occur in a restricted scenario. In this paper, a novel multi-scale detection method is presented, which is later used to extract geometric and content features, resulting in a multi-person video tracking system. Having built a dataset from scratch together with its ground truth (more than 10k bounding boxes), standard metrics are evaluated, obtaining notable results both in terms of detection (F1-score) and tracking (MOTA). The presented system could be used as a source of data gathering in order to extract useful statistics and semantic analyses a posteriori

Sparse variational regularization for visual motion estimation

The computation of visual motion is a key component in numerous computer vision tasks such as object detection, visual object tracking and activity recognition. Despite exten- sive research effort, efficient handling of motion discontinuities, occlusions and illumina- tion changes still remains elusive in visual motion estimation. The work presented in this thesis utilizes variational methods to handle the aforementioned problems because these methods allow the integration of various mathematical concepts into a single en- ergy minimization framework. This thesis applies the concepts from signal sparsity to the variational regularization for visual motion estimation. The regularization is designed in such a way that it handles motion discontinuities and can detect object occlusions

Video Stabilisation Based on Spatial Transformer Networks

User-Generated Content is normally recorded with mobile phones by non-professionals, which leads to a low viewing experience due to artifacts such as jitter and blur. Other jittery videos are those recorded with mounted cameras or moving platforms. In these scenarios, Digital Video Stabilization (DVS) has been utilized, to create high quality, professional level videos. In the industry and academia, there are a number of traditional and Deep Learning (DL)-based DVS systems, however both approaches have limitations: the former struggles to extract and track features in a number of scenarios, and the latter struggles with camera path smoothing, a hard problem to define in this context. On the other hand, traditional methods have shown good performance in smoothing camera path whereas DL methods are effective in feature extraction, tracking, and motion parameter estimation. Hence, to the best of our knowledge the available DVS systems struggle to stabilize videos in a wide variety of scenarios, especially with high motion and certain scene content, such as textureless areas, dark scenes, close object, lack of depth, amongst others. Another challenge faced by current DVS implementations is the resulting artifacts that such systems add to the stabilized videos, degrading the viewing experience. These artifacts are mainly distortion, blur, zoom, and ghosting effects. In this thesis, we utilize the strengths of Deep Learning and traditional methods for video stabilization. Our approach is robust to a wide variety of scene content and camera motion, and avoids adding artifacts to the stabilized video. First, we provide a dataset and evaluation framework for Deep Learning-based DVS. Then, we present our image alignment module, which contains a Spatial Transformer Network (STN). Next, we leverage this module to propose a homography-based video stabilization system. Aiming at avoiding blur and distortion caused by homographies, our next proposal is a translation-based video stabilization method, which contains Exponential Weighted Moving Averages (EWMAs) to smooth the camera path. Finally, instead of using EWMAs, we study the utilization of filters in our approach. In this case, we compare a number of filters and choose the filters with best performance. Since the quality of experience of a viewer does not only consist of video stability, but also of blur and distortion, we consider it is a good trade off to allow some jitter left on the video while avoiding adding distortion and blur. In all three cases, we show that this approach pays off, since our systems ourperform the state-of-the-art proposals

Structure-aware image denoising, super-resolution, and enhancement methods

Denoising, super-resolution and structure enhancement are classical image processing applications. The motive behind their existence is to aid our visual analysis of raw digital images. Despite tremendous progress in these fields, certain difficult problems are still open to research. For example, denoising and super-resolution techniques which possess all the following properties, are very scarce: They must preserve critical structures like corners, should be robust to the type of noise distribution, avoid undesirable artefacts, and also be fast. The area of structure enhancement also has an unresolved issue: Very little efforts have been put into designing models that can tackle anisotropic deformations in the image acquisition process. In this thesis, we design novel methods in the form of partial differential equations, patch-based approaches and variational models to overcome the aforementioned obstacles. In most cases, our methods outperform the existing approaches in both quality and speed, despite being applicable to a broader range of practical situations.Entrauschen, Superresolution und Strukturverbesserung sind klassische Anwendungen der Bildverarbeitung. Ihre Existenz bedingt sich in dem Bestreben, die visuelle Begutachtung digitaler Bildrohdaten zu unterstützen. Trotz erheblicher Fortschritte in diesen Feldern bedürfen bestimmte schwierige Probleme noch weiterer Forschung. So sind beispielsweise Entrauschungsund Superresolutionsverfahren, welche alle der folgenden Eingenschaften besitzen, sehr selten: die Erhaltung wichtiger Strukturen wie Ecken, Robustheit bezüglich der Rauschverteilung, Vermeidung unerwünschter Artefakte und niedrige Laufzeit. Auch im Gebiet der Strukturverbesserung liegt ein ungelöstes Problem vor: Bisher wurde nur sehr wenig Forschungsaufwand in die Entwicklung von Modellen investieret, welche anisotrope Deformationen in bildgebenden Verfahren bewältigen können. In dieser Arbeit entwerfen wir neue Methoden in Form von partiellen Differentialgleichungen, patch-basierten Ansätzen und Variationsmodellen um die oben erwähnten Hindernisse zu überwinden. In den meisten Fällen übertreffen unsere Methoden nicht nur qualitativ die bisher verwendeten Ansätze, sondern lösen die gestellten Aufgaben auch schneller. Zudem decken wir mit unseren Modellen einen breiteren Bereich praktischer Fragestellungen ab