2,280 research outputs found
Learning how to be robust: Deep polynomial regression
Polynomial regression is a recurrent problem with a large number of
applications. In computer vision it often appears in motion analysis. Whatever
the application, standard methods for regression of polynomial models tend to
deliver biased results when the input data is heavily contaminated by outliers.
Moreover, the problem is even harder when outliers have strong structure.
Departing from problem-tailored heuristics for robust estimation of parametric
models, we explore deep convolutional neural networks. Our work aims to find a
generic approach for training deep regression models without the explicit need
of supervised annotation. We bypass the need for a tailored loss function on
the regression parameters by attaching to our model a differentiable hard-wired
decoder corresponding to the polynomial operation at hand. We demonstrate the
value of our findings by comparing with standard robust regression methods.
Furthermore, we demonstrate how to use such models for a real computer vision
problem, i.e., video stabilization. The qualitative and quantitative
experiments show that neural networks are able to learn robustness for general
polynomial regression, with results that well overpass scores of traditional
robust estimation methods.Comment: 18 pages, conferenc
Autonomous Tissue Scanning under Free-Form Motion for Intraoperative Tissue Characterisation
In Minimally Invasive Surgery (MIS), tissue scanning with imaging probes is
required for subsurface visualisation to characterise the state of the tissue.
However, scanning of large tissue surfaces in the presence of deformation is a
challenging task for the surgeon. Recently, robot-assisted local tissue
scanning has been investigated for motion stabilisation of imaging probes to
facilitate the capturing of good quality images and reduce the surgeon's
cognitive load. Nonetheless, these approaches require the tissue surface to be
static or deform with periodic motion. To eliminate these assumptions, we
propose a visual servoing framework for autonomous tissue scanning, able to
deal with free-form tissue deformation. The 3D structure of the surgical scene
is recovered and a feature-based method is proposed to estimate the motion of
the tissue in real-time. A desired scanning trajectory is manually defined on a
reference frame and continuously updated using projective geometry to follow
the tissue motion and control the movement of the robotic arm. The advantage of
the proposed method is that it does not require the learning of the tissue
motion prior to scanning and can deal with free-form deformation. We deployed
this framework on the da Vinci surgical robot using the da Vinci Research Kit
(dVRK) for Ultrasound tissue scanning. Since the framework does not rely on
information from the Ultrasound data, it can be easily extended to other
probe-based imaging modalities.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures, ICRA 202
Towards retrieving force feedback in robotic-assisted surgery: a supervised neuro-recurrent-vision approach
Robotic-assisted minimally invasive surgeries have gained a lot of popularity over conventional procedures as they offer many benefits to both surgeons and patients. Nonetheless, they still suffer from some limitations that affect their outcome. One of them is the lack of force feedback which restricts the surgeon's sense of touch and might reduce precision during a procedure. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel force estimation approach that combines a vision based solution with supervised learning to estimate the applied force and provide the surgeon with a suitable representation of it. The proposed solution starts with extracting the geometry of motion of the heart's surface by minimizing an energy functional to recover its 3D deformable structure. A deep network, based on a LSTM-RNN architecture, is then used to learn the relationship between the extracted visual-geometric information and the applied force, and to find accurate mapping between the two. Our proposed force estimation solution avoids the drawbacks usually associated with force sensing devices, such as biocompatibility and integration issues. We evaluate our approach on phantom and realistic tissues in which we report an average root-mean square error of 0.02 N.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft
3D Object Discovery and Modeling Using Single RGB-D Images Containing Multiple Object Instances
Unsupervised object modeling is important in robotics, especially for
handling a large set of objects. We present a method for unsupervised 3D object
discovery, reconstruction, and localization that exploits multiple instances of
an identical object contained in a single RGB-D image. The proposed method does
not rely on segmentation, scene knowledge, or user input, and thus is easily
scalable. Our method aims to find recurrent patterns in a single RGB-D image by
utilizing appearance and geometry of the salient regions. We extract keypoints
and match them in pairs based on their descriptors. We then generate triplets
of the keypoints matching with each other using several geometric criteria to
minimize false matches. The relative poses of the matched triplets are computed
and clustered to discover sets of triplet pairs with similar relative poses.
Triplets belonging to the same set are likely to belong to the same object and
are used to construct an initial object model. Detection of remaining instances
with the initial object model using RANSAC allows to further expand and refine
the model. The automatically generated object models are both compact and
descriptive. We show quantitative and qualitative results on RGB-D images with
various objects including some from the Amazon Picking Challenge. We also
demonstrate the use of our method in an object picking scenario with a robotic
arm
Visibility Constrained Generative Model for Depth-based 3D Facial Pose Tracking
In this paper, we propose a generative framework that unifies depth-based 3D
facial pose tracking and face model adaptation on-the-fly, in the unconstrained
scenarios with heavy occlusions and arbitrary facial expression variations.
Specifically, we introduce a statistical 3D morphable model that flexibly
describes the distribution of points on the surface of the face model, with an
efficient switchable online adaptation that gradually captures the identity of
the tracked subject and rapidly constructs a suitable face model when the
subject changes. Moreover, unlike prior art that employed ICP-based facial pose
estimation, to improve robustness to occlusions, we propose a ray visibility
constraint that regularizes the pose based on the face model's visibility with
respect to the input point cloud. Ablation studies and experimental results on
Biwi and ICT-3DHP datasets demonstrate that the proposed framework is effective
and outperforms completing state-of-the-art depth-based methods
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