Motion from Fixation

We study the problem of estimating rigid motion from a sequence of monocular perspective images obtained by navigating around an object while fixating a particular feature point. The motivation comes from the mechanics of the buman eye, which either pursuits smoothly some fixation point in the scene, or "saccades" between different fixation points. In particular, we are interested in understanding whether fixation helps the process of estimating motion in the sense that it makes it more robust, better conditioned or simpler to solve. We cast the problem in the framework of "dynamic epipolar geometry", and propose an implicit dynamical model for recursively estimating motion from fixation. This allows us to compare directly the quality of the estimates of motion obtained by imposing the fixation constraint, or by assuming a general rigid motion, simply by changing the geometry of the parameter space while maintaining the same structure of the recursive estimator. We also present a closed-form static solution from two views, and a recursive estimator of the absolute attitude between the viewer and the scene. One important issue is how do the estimates degrade in presence of disturbances in the tracking procedure. We describe a simple fixation control that converges exponentially, which is complemented by a image shift-registration for achieving sub-pixel accuracy, and assess how small deviations from perfect tracking affect the estimates of motion

A Unified Framework for Mutual Improvement of SLAM and Semantic Segmentation

This paper presents a novel framework for simultaneously implementing localization and segmentation, which are two of the most important vision-based tasks for robotics. While the goals and techniques used for them were considered to be different previously, we show that by making use of the intermediate results of the two modules, their performance can be enhanced at the same time. Our framework is able to handle both the instantaneous motion and long-term changes of instances in localization with the help of the segmentation result, which also benefits from the refined 3D pose information. We conduct experiments on various datasets, and prove that our framework works effectively on improving the precision and robustness of the two tasks and outperforms existing localization and segmentation algorithms.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures.This work has been accepted by ICRA 2019. The demo video can be found at https://youtu.be/Bkt53dAehj

Reducing “Structure from Motion”: a general framework for dynamic vision. 2. Implementation and experimental assessment

For pt.1 see ibid., p.933-42 (1998). A number of methods have been proposed in the literature for estimating scene-structure and ego-motion from a sequence of images using dynamical models. Despite the fact that all methods may be derived from a “natural” dynamical model within a unified framework, from an engineering perspective there are a number of trade-offs that lead to different strategies depending upon the applications and the goals one is targeting. We want to characterize and compare the properties of each model such that the engineer may choose the one best suited to the specific application. We analyze the properties of filters derived from each dynamical model under a variety of experimental conditions, assess the accuracy of the estimates, their robustness to measurement noise, sensitivity to initial conditions and visual angle, effects of the bas-relief ambiguity and occlusions, dependence upon the number of image measurements and their sampling rate

Reducing "Structure From Motion": a General Framework for Dynamic Vision - Part 2: Experimental Evaluation

A number of methods have been proposed in the literature for estimating scene-structure and ego-motion from a sequence of images using dynamical models. Although all methods may be derived from a "natural" dynamical model within a unified framework, from an engineering perspective there are a number of trade-offs that lead to different strategies depending upon the specific applications and the goals one is targeting. Which one is the winning strategy? In this paper we analyze the properties of the dynamical models that originate from each strategy under a variety of experimental conditions. For each model we assess the accuracy of the estimates, their robustness to measurement noise, sensitivity to initial conditions and visual angle, effects of the bas-relief ambiguity and occlusions, dependence upon the number of image measurements and their sampling rate

Hierarchical fuzzy logic based approach for object tracking

In this paper a novel tracking approach based on fuzzy concepts is introduced. A methodology for both single and multiple object tracking is presented. The aim of this methodology is to use these concepts as a tool to, while maintaining the needed accuracy, reduce the complexity usually involved in object tracking problems. Several dynamic fuzzy sets are constructed according to both kinematic and non-kinematic properties that distinguish the object to be tracked. Meanwhile kinematic related fuzzy sets model the object's motion pattern, the non-kinematic fuzzy sets model the object's appearance. The tracking task is performed through the fusion of these fuzzy models by means of an inference engine. This way, object detection and matching steps are performed exclusively using inference rules on fuzzy sets. In the multiple object methodology, each object is associated with a confidence degree and a hierarchical implementation is performed based on that confidence degree.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio