36,005 research outputs found
Enabling Depth-driven Visual Attention on the iCub Humanoid Robot: Instructions for Use and New Perspectives
The importance of depth perception in the interactions that humans have
within their nearby space is a well established fact. Consequently, it is also
well known that the possibility of exploiting good stereo information would
ease and, in many cases, enable, a large variety of attentional and interactive
behaviors on humanoid robotic platforms. However, the difficulty of computing
real-time and robust binocular disparity maps from moving stereo cameras often
prevents from relying on this kind of cue to visually guide robots' attention
and actions in real-world scenarios. The contribution of this paper is
two-fold: first, we show that the Efficient Large-scale Stereo Matching
algorithm (ELAS) by A. Geiger et al. 2010 for computation of the disparity map
is well suited to be used on a humanoid robotic platform as the iCub robot;
second, we show how, provided with a fast and reliable stereo system,
implementing relatively challenging visual behaviors in natural settings can
require much less effort. As a case of study we consider the common situation
where the robot is asked to focus the attention on one object close in the
scene, showing how a simple but effective disparity-based segmentation solves
the problem in this case. Indeed this example paves the way to a variety of
other similar applications
Guided Filtering based Pyramidal Stereo Matching for Unrectified Images
Stereo matching deals with recovering quantitative
depth information from a set of input images, based on the visual
disparity between corresponding points. Generally most of the
algorithms assume that the processed images are rectified. As
robotics becomes popular, conducting stereo matching in the
context of cloth manipulation, such as obtaining the disparity
map of the garments from the two cameras of the cloth folding
robot, is useful and challenging. This is resulted from the fact of
the high efficiency, accuracy and low memory requirement under
the usage of high resolution images in order to capture the details
(e.g. cloth wrinkles) for the given application (e.g. cloth folding).
Meanwhile, the images can be unrectified. Therefore, we propose
to adapt guided filtering algorithm into the pyramidical stereo
matching framework that works directly for unrectified images.
To evaluate the proposed unrectified stereo matching in terms of
accuracy, we present three datasets that are suited to especially
the characteristics of the task of cloth manipulations. By com-
paring the proposed algorithm with two baseline algorithms on
those three datasets, we demonstrate that our proposed approach
is accurate, efficient and requires low memory. This also shows
that rather than relying on image rectification, directly applying
stereo matching through the unrectified images can be also quite
effective and meanwhile efficien
Fast, Accurate Thin-Structure Obstacle Detection for Autonomous Mobile Robots
Safety is paramount for mobile robotic platforms such as self-driving cars
and unmanned aerial vehicles. This work is devoted to a task that is
indispensable for safety yet was largely overlooked in the past -- detecting
obstacles that are of very thin structures, such as wires, cables and tree
branches. This is a challenging problem, as thin objects can be problematic for
active sensors such as lidar and sonar and even for stereo cameras. In this
work, we propose to use video sequences for thin obstacle detection. We
represent obstacles with edges in the video frames, and reconstruct them in 3D
using efficient edge-based visual odometry techniques. We provide both a
monocular camera solution and a stereo camera solution. The former incorporates
Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) data to solve scale ambiguity, while the latter
enjoys a novel, purely vision-based solution. Experiments demonstrated that the
proposed methods are fast and able to detect thin obstacles robustly and
accurately under various conditions.Comment: Appeared at IEEE CVPR 2017 Workshop on Embedded Visio
Anytime Stereo Image Depth Estimation on Mobile Devices
Many applications of stereo depth estimation in robotics require the
generation of accurate disparity maps in real time under significant
computational constraints. Current state-of-the-art algorithms force a choice
between either generating accurate mappings at a slow pace, or quickly
generating inaccurate ones, and additionally these methods typically require
far too many parameters to be usable on power- or memory-constrained devices.
Motivated by these shortcomings, we propose a novel approach for disparity
prediction in the anytime setting. In contrast to prior work, our end-to-end
learned approach can trade off computation and accuracy at inference time.
Depth estimation is performed in stages, during which the model can be queried
at any time to output its current best estimate. Our final model can process
1242375 resolution images within a range of 10-35 FPS on an NVIDIA
Jetson TX2 module with only marginal increases in error -- using two orders of
magnitude fewer parameters than the most competitive baseline. The source code
is available at https://github.com/mileyan/AnyNet .Comment: Accepted by ICRA201
Acceleration of stereo-matching on multi-core CPU and GPU
This paper presents an accelerated version of a
dense stereo-correspondence algorithm for two different parallelism
enabled architectures, multi-core CPU and GPU. The
algorithm is part of the vision system developed for a binocular
robot-head in the context of the CloPeMa 1 research project.
This research project focuses on the conception of a new clothes
folding robot with real-time and high resolution requirements
for the vision system. The performance analysis shows that
the parallelised stereo-matching algorithm has been significantly
accelerated, maintaining 12x and 176x speed-up respectively
for multi-core CPU and GPU, compared with non-SIMD singlethread
CPU. To analyse the origin of the speed-up and gain
deeper understanding about the choice of the optimal hardware,
the algorithm was broken into key sub-tasks and the performance
was tested for four different hardware architectures
High-Performance and Tunable Stereo Reconstruction
Traditional stereo algorithms have focused their efforts on reconstruction
quality and have largely avoided prioritizing for run time performance. Robots,
on the other hand, require quick maneuverability and effective computation to
observe its immediate environment and perform tasks within it. In this work, we
propose a high-performance and tunable stereo disparity estimation method, with
a peak frame-rate of 120Hz (VGA resolution, on a single CPU-thread), that can
potentially enable robots to quickly reconstruct their immediate surroundings
and maneuver at high-speeds. Our key contribution is a disparity estimation
algorithm that iteratively approximates the scene depth via a piece-wise planar
mesh from stereo imagery, with a fast depth validation step for semi-dense
reconstruction. The mesh is initially seeded with sparsely matched keypoints,
and is recursively tessellated and refined as needed (via a resampling stage),
to provide the desired stereo disparity accuracy. The inherent simplicity and
speed of our approach, with the ability to tune it to a desired reconstruction
quality and runtime performance makes it a compelling solution for applications
in high-speed vehicles.Comment: Accepted to International Conference on Robotics and Automation
(ICRA) 2016; 8 pages, 5 figure
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