1,187 research outputs found
Lifting GIS Maps into Strong Geometric Context for Scene Understanding
Contextual information can have a substantial impact on the performance of
visual tasks such as semantic segmentation, object detection, and geometric
estimation. Data stored in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) offers a rich
source of contextual information that has been largely untapped by computer
vision. We propose to leverage such information for scene understanding by
combining GIS resources with large sets of unorganized photographs using
Structure from Motion (SfM) techniques. We present a pipeline to quickly
generate strong 3D geometric priors from 2D GIS data using SfM models aligned
with minimal user input. Given an image resectioned against this model, we
generate robust predictions of depth, surface normals, and semantic labels. We
show that the precision of the predicted geometry is substantially more
accurate other single-image depth estimation methods. We then demonstrate the
utility of these contextual constraints for re-scoring pedestrian detections,
and use these GIS contextual features alongside object detection score maps to
improve a CRF-based semantic segmentation framework, boosting accuracy over
baseline models
Competent genetic-evolutionary optimization of water distribution systems
A genetic algorithm has been applied to the optimal design and rehabilitation of a water distribution system. Many of the previous applications have been limited to small water distribution systems, where the computer time used for solving the problem has been relatively small. In order to apply genetic and evolutionary optimization technique to a large-scale water distribution system, this paper employs one of competent genetic-evolutionary algorithms - a messy genetic algorithm to enhance the efficiency of an optimization procedure. A maximum flexibility is ensured by the formulation of a string and solution representation scheme, a fitness definition, and the integration of a well-developed hydraulic network solver that facilitate the application of a genetic algorithm to the optimization of a water distribution system. Two benchmark problems of water pipeline design and a real water distribution system are presented to demonstrate the application of the improved technique. The results obtained show that the number of the design trials required by the messy genetic algorithm is consistently fewer than the other genetic algorithms
DeepPointMap: Advancing LiDAR SLAM with Unified Neural Descriptors
Point clouds have shown significant potential in various domains, including
Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM). However, existing approaches
either rely on dense point clouds to achieve high localization accuracy or use
generalized descriptors to reduce map size. Unfortunately, these two aspects
seem to conflict with each other. To address this limitation, we propose a
unified architecture, DeepPointMap, achieving excellent preference on both
aspects. We utilize neural network to extract highly representative and sparse
neural descriptors from point clouds, enabling memory-efficient map
representation and accurate multi-scale localization tasks (e.g., odometry and
loop-closure). Moreover, we showcase the versatility of our framework by
extending it to more challenging multi-agent collaborative SLAM. The promising
results obtained in these scenarios further emphasize the effectiveness and
potential of our approach
Recommended from our members
Hardward and algorithm architectures for real-time additive synthesis
Additive synthesis is a fundamental computer music synthesis paradigm tracing its origins to the work of Fourier and Helmholtz. Rudimentary implementation linearly combines harmonic sinusoids (or partials) to generate tones whose perceived timbral characteristics are a strong function of the partial amplitude spectrum. Having evolved over time, additive synthesis describes a collection of algorithms each characterised by the time-varying linear combination of basis components to generate temporal evolution of timbre. Basis components include exactly harmonic partials, inharmonic partials with time-varying frequency or non-sinusoidal waveforms each with distinct spectral characteristics. Additive synthesis of polyphonic musical instrument tones requires a large number of independently controlled partials incurring a large computational overhead whose investigation and reduction is a key motivator for this work. The thesis begins with a review of prevalent synthesis techniques setting additive synthesis in context and introducing the spectrum modelling paradigm which provides baseline spectral data to the additive synthesis process obtained from the analysis of natural sounds. We proceed to investigate recursive and phase accumulating digital sinusoidal oscillator algorithms, defining specific metrics to quantify relative performance. The concepts of phase accumulation, table lookup phase-amplitude mapping and interpolated fractional addressing are introduced and developed and shown to underpin an additive synthesis subclass - wavetable lookup synthesis (WLS). WLS performance is simulated against specific metrics and parameter conditions peculiar to computer music requirements. We conclude by presenting processing architectures which accelerate computational throughput of specific WLS operations and the sinusoidal additive synthesis model. In particular, we introduce and investigate the concept of phase domain processing and present several “pipeline friendly” arithmetic architectures using this technique which implement the additive synthesis of sinusoidal partials
A Comprehensive Performance Evaluation of Deformable Face Tracking "In-the-Wild"
Recently, technologies such as face detection, facial landmark localisation
and face recognition and verification have matured enough to provide effective
and efficient solutions for imagery captured under arbitrary conditions
(referred to as "in-the-wild"). This is partially attributed to the fact that
comprehensive "in-the-wild" benchmarks have been developed for face detection,
landmark localisation and recognition/verification. A very important technology
that has not been thoroughly evaluated yet is deformable face tracking
"in-the-wild". Until now, the performance has mainly been assessed
qualitatively by visually assessing the result of a deformable face tracking
technology on short videos. In this paper, we perform the first, to the best of
our knowledge, thorough evaluation of state-of-the-art deformable face tracking
pipelines using the recently introduced 300VW benchmark. We evaluate many
different architectures focusing mainly on the task of on-line deformable face
tracking. In particular, we compare the following general strategies: (a)
generic face detection plus generic facial landmark localisation, (b) generic
model free tracking plus generic facial landmark localisation, as well as (c)
hybrid approaches using state-of-the-art face detection, model free tracking
and facial landmark localisation technologies. Our evaluation reveals future
avenues for further research on the topic.Comment: E. Antonakos and P. Snape contributed equally and have joint second
authorshi
- …