Point Cloud Registration for LiDAR and Photogrammetric Data: a Critical Synthesis and Performance Analysis on Classic and Deep Learning Algorithms

Recent advances in computer vision and deep learning have shown promising performance in estimating rigid/similarity transformation between unregistered point clouds of complex objects and scenes. However, their performances are mostly evaluated using a limited number of datasets from a single sensor (e.g. Kinect or RealSense cameras), lacking a comprehensive overview of their applicability in photogrammetric 3D mapping scenarios. In this work, we provide a comprehensive review of the state-of-the-art (SOTA) point cloud registration methods, where we analyze and evaluate these methods using a diverse set of point cloud data from indoor to satellite sources. The quantitative analysis allows for exploring the strengths, applicability, challenges, and future trends of these methods. In contrast to existing analysis works that introduce point cloud registration as a holistic process, our experimental analysis is based on its inherent two-step process to better comprehend these approaches including feature/keypoint-based initial coarse registration and dense fine registration through cloud-to-cloud (C2C) optimization. More than ten methods, including classic hand-crafted, deep-learning-based feature correspondence, and robust C2C methods were tested. We observed that the success rate of most of the algorithms are fewer than 40% over the datasets we tested and there are still are large margin of improvement upon existing algorithms concerning 3D sparse corresopondence search, and the ability to register point clouds with complex geometry and occlusions. With the evaluated statistics on three datasets, we conclude the best-performing methods for each step and provide our recommendations, and outlook future efforts.Comment: 7 figure

Efficient Constellation-Based Map-Merging for Semantic SLAM

Data association in SLAM is fundamentally challenging, and handling ambiguity well is crucial to achieve robust operation in real-world environments. When ambiguous measurements arise, conservatism often mandates that the measurement is discarded or a new landmark is initialized rather than risking an incorrect association. To address the inevitable `duplicate' landmarks that arise, we present an efficient map-merging framework to detect duplicate constellations of landmarks, providing a high-confidence loop-closure mechanism well-suited for object-level SLAM. This approach uses an incrementally-computable approximation of landmark uncertainty that only depends on local information in the SLAM graph, avoiding expensive recovery of the full system covariance matrix. This enables a search based on geometric consistency (GC) (rather than full joint compatibility (JC)) that inexpensively reduces the search space to a handful of `best' hypotheses. Furthermore, we reformulate the commonly-used interpretation tree to allow for more efficient integration of clique-based pairwise compatibility, accelerating the branch-and-bound max-cardinality search. Our method is demonstrated to match the performance of full JC methods at significantly-reduced computational cost, facilitating robust object-based loop-closure over large SLAM problems.Comment: Accepted to IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 201

Cross Pixel Optical Flow Similarity for Self-Supervised Learning

We propose a novel method for learning convolutional neural image representations without manual supervision. We use motion cues in the form of optical flow, to supervise representations of static images. The obvious approach of training a network to predict flow from a single image can be needlessly difficult due to intrinsic ambiguities in this prediction task. We instead propose a much simpler learning goal: embed pixels such that the similarity between their embeddings matches that between their optical flow vectors. At test time, the learned deep network can be used without access to video or flow information and transferred to tasks such as image classification, detection, and segmentation. Our method, which significantly simplifies previous attempts at using motion for self-supervision, achieves state-of-the-art results in self-supervision using motion cues, competitive results for self-supervision in general, and is overall state of the art in self-supervised pretraining for semantic image segmentation, as demonstrated on standard benchmarks

Cognate maximization versus cognate minimization: in search of a "golden middle" for Altaic etymology

The paper presents a brief evaluation of the current state of affairs in the field of comparative Altaic linguistics, claiming that the relative lack of progress over the past 15 years is largely due to the conflicting opposing strategies of "cognate maximization" and "cognate minimization", respectively adopted by proponents and opponents of the hypothesis, neither of which is capable to adequately address the complexity of the issue. It is suggested that, in order to advance the Altaic hypothesis further, a "golden middle strategy" has to be worked out, and that one of the steps towards it could consist in embracing the methodology of onomasiological reconstruction, which, in addition to regularity of phonetic correspondences, places much more emphasis on the semantic and distributional properties of potential cognates and regards the etymological corpus as a systematic network rather than a collection of random individual comparanda. Although all the problematic issues and proposed solutions are discussed with examples from comparative Altaic data, they are equally relevant to most other hypotheses of long-distance relationship