A Minimalist Approach to Type-Agnostic Detection of Quadrics in Point Clouds

This paper proposes a segmentation-free, automatic and efficient procedure to detect general geometric quadric forms in point clouds, where clutter and occlusions are inevitable. Our everyday world is dominated by man-made objects which are designed using 3D primitives (such as planes, cones, spheres, cylinders, etc.). These objects are also omnipresent in industrial environments. This gives rise to the possibility of abstracting 3D scenes through primitives, thereby positions these geometric forms as an integral part of perception and high level 3D scene understanding. As opposed to state-of-the-art, where a tailored algorithm treats each primitive type separately, we propose to encapsulate all types in a single robust detection procedure. At the center of our approach lies a closed form 3D quadric fit, operating in both primal & dual spaces and requiring as low as 4 oriented-points. Around this fit, we design a novel, local null-space voting strategy to reduce the 4-point case to 3. Voting is coupled with the famous RANSAC and makes our algorithm orders of magnitude faster than its conventional counterparts. This is the first method capable of performing a generic cross-type multi-object primitive detection in difficult scenes. Results on synthetic and real datasets support the validity of our method.Comment: Accepted for publication at CVPR 201

Mapping Big Data into Knowledge Space with Cognitive Cyber-Infrastructure

Big data research has attracted great attention in science, technology, industry and society. It is developing with the evolving scientific paradigm, the fourth industrial revolution, and the transformational innovation of technologies. However, its nature and fundamental challenge have not been recognized, and its own methodology has not been formed. This paper explores and answers the following questions: What is big data? What are the basic methods for representing, managing and analyzing big data? What is the relationship between big data and knowledge? Can we find a mapping from big data into knowledge space? What kind of infrastructure is required to support not only big data management and analysis but also knowledge discovery, sharing and management? What is the relationship between big data and science paradigm? What is the nature and fundamental challenge of big data computing? A multi-dimensional perspective is presented toward a methodology of big data computing.Comment: 59 page

A Power-Aware Framework for Executing Streaming Programs on Networks-on-Chip

Nilesh Karavadara, Simon Folie, Michael Zolda, Vu Thien Nga Nguyen, Raimund Kirner, 'A Power-Aware Framework for Executing Streaming Programs on Networks-on-Chip'. Paper presented at the Int'l Workshop on Performance, Power and Predictability of Many-Core Embedded Systems (3PMCES'14), Dresden, Germany, 24-28 March 2014.Software developers are discovering that practices which have successfully served single-core platforms for decades do no longer work for multi-cores. Stream processing is a parallel execution model that is well-suited for architectures with multiple computational elements that are connected by a network. We propose a power-aware streaming execution layer for network-on-chip architectures that addresses the energy constraints of embedded devices. Our proof-of-concept implementation targets the Intel SCC processor, which connects 48 cores via a network-on- chip. We motivate our design decisions and describe the status of our implementation

Unifying Multiple Knowledge Domains Using the ARTMAP Information Fusion System

Sensors working at different times, locations, and scales, and experts with different goals, languages, and situations, may produce apparently inconsistent image labels that are reconciled by their implicit underlying relationships. Even when such relationships are unknown to the user, an ARTMAP information fusion system discovers a hierarchical knowledge structure for a labeled dataset. The present paper addresses the problem of integrating two or more independent knowledge hierarchies based on the same low-level classes. The new system fuses independent domains into a unified knowledge structure, discovering cross-domain rules in this process. The system infers multi-level relationships among groups of output classes, without any supervised labeling of these relationships. In order to self-organize its expert system, ARTMAP information fusion system features distributed code representations that exploit the neural network’s capacity for one-to-many learning. The fusion system software and testbed datasets are available from http://cns.bu.edu/techlabNational Science Foundation (SBE-0354378); National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NMA 201-01-1-2016