24,823 research outputs found
Visual 3-D SLAM from UAVs
The aim of the paper is to present, test and discuss the implementation of Visual SLAM techniques to images taken from Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) outdoors, in partially structured environments. Every issue of the whole process is discussed in order to obtain more accurate localization and mapping from UAVs flights. Firstly, the issues related to the visual features of objects in the scene, their distance to the UAV, and the related image acquisition system and their calibration are evaluated for improving the whole process. Other important, considered issues are related to the image processing techniques, such as interest point detection, the matching procedure and the scaling factor. The whole system has been tested using the COLIBRI mini UAV in partially structured environments. The results that have been obtained for localization, tested against the GPS information of the flights, show that Visual SLAM delivers reliable localization and mapping that makes it suitable for some outdoors applications when flying UAVs
Calibration Wizard: A Guidance System for Camera Calibration Based on Modelling Geometric and Corner Uncertainty
It is well known that the accuracy of a calibration depends strongly on the
choice of camera poses from which images of a calibration object are acquired.
We present a system -- Calibration Wizard -- that interactively guides a user
towards taking optimal calibration images. For each new image to be taken, the
system computes, from all previously acquired images, the pose that leads to
the globally maximum reduction of expected uncertainty on intrinsic parameters
and then guides the user towards that pose. We also show how to incorporate
uncertainty in corner point position in a novel principled manner, for both,
calibration and computation of the next best pose. Synthetic and real-world
experiments are performed to demonstrate the effectiveness of Calibration
Wizard.Comment: Oral presentation at ICCV 201
Event-based Vision: A Survey
Event cameras are bio-inspired sensors that differ from conventional frame
cameras: Instead of capturing images at a fixed rate, they asynchronously
measure per-pixel brightness changes, and output a stream of events that encode
the time, location and sign of the brightness changes. Event cameras offer
attractive properties compared to traditional cameras: high temporal resolution
(in the order of microseconds), very high dynamic range (140 dB vs. 60 dB), low
power consumption, and high pixel bandwidth (on the order of kHz) resulting in
reduced motion blur. Hence, event cameras have a large potential for robotics
and computer vision in challenging scenarios for traditional cameras, such as
low-latency, high speed, and high dynamic range. However, novel methods are
required to process the unconventional output of these sensors in order to
unlock their potential. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of the
emerging field of event-based vision, with a focus on the applications and the
algorithms developed to unlock the outstanding properties of event cameras. We
present event cameras from their working principle, the actual sensors that are
available and the tasks that they have been used for, from low-level vision
(feature detection and tracking, optic flow, etc.) to high-level vision
(reconstruction, segmentation, recognition). We also discuss the techniques
developed to process events, including learning-based techniques, as well as
specialized processors for these novel sensors, such as spiking neural
networks. Additionally, we highlight the challenges that remain to be tackled
and the opportunities that lie ahead in the search for a more efficient,
bio-inspired way for machines to perceive and interact with the world
Dense Piecewise Planar RGB-D SLAM for Indoor Environments
The paper exploits weak Manhattan constraints to parse the structure of
indoor environments from RGB-D video sequences in an online setting. We extend
the previous approach for single view parsing of indoor scenes to video
sequences and formulate the problem of recovering the floor plan of the
environment as an optimal labeling problem solved using dynamic programming.
The temporal continuity is enforced in a recursive setting, where labeling from
previous frames is used as a prior term in the objective function. In addition
to recovery of piecewise planar weak Manhattan structure of the extended
environment, the orthogonality constraints are also exploited by visual
odometry and pose graph optimization. This yields reliable estimates in the
presence of large motions and absence of distinctive features to track. We
evaluate our method on several challenging indoors sequences demonstrating
accurate SLAM and dense mapping of low texture environments. On existing TUM
benchmark we achieve competitive results with the alternative approaches which
fail in our environments.Comment: International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)
201
Robust Intrinsic and Extrinsic Calibration of RGB-D Cameras
Color-depth cameras (RGB-D cameras) have become the primary sensors in most
robotics systems, from service robotics to industrial robotics applications.
Typical consumer-grade RGB-D cameras are provided with a coarse intrinsic and
extrinsic calibration that generally does not meet the accuracy requirements
needed by many robotics applications (e.g., highly accurate 3D environment
reconstruction and mapping, high precision object recognition and localization,
...). In this paper, we propose a human-friendly, reliable and accurate
calibration framework that enables to easily estimate both the intrinsic and
extrinsic parameters of a general color-depth sensor couple. Our approach is
based on a novel two components error model. This model unifies the error
sources of RGB-D pairs based on different technologies, such as
structured-light 3D cameras and time-of-flight cameras. Our method provides
some important advantages compared to other state-of-the-art systems: it is
general (i.e., well suited for different types of sensors), based on an easy
and stable calibration protocol, provides a greater calibration accuracy, and
has been implemented within the ROS robotics framework. We report detailed
experimental validations and performance comparisons to support our statements
Independent Motion Detection with Event-driven Cameras
Unlike standard cameras that send intensity images at a constant frame rate,
event-driven cameras asynchronously report pixel-level brightness changes,
offering low latency and high temporal resolution (both in the order of
micro-seconds). As such, they have great potential for fast and low power
vision algorithms for robots. Visual tracking, for example, is easily achieved
even for very fast stimuli, as only moving objects cause brightness changes.
However, cameras mounted on a moving robot are typically non-stationary and the
same tracking problem becomes confounded by background clutter events due to
the robot ego-motion. In this paper, we propose a method for segmenting the
motion of an independently moving object for event-driven cameras. Our method
detects and tracks corners in the event stream and learns the statistics of
their motion as a function of the robot's joint velocities when no
independently moving objects are present. During robot operation, independently
moving objects are identified by discrepancies between the predicted corner
velocities from ego-motion and the measured corner velocities. We validate the
algorithm on data collected from the neuromorphic iCub robot. We achieve a
precision of ~ 90 % and show that the method is robust to changes in speed of
both the head and the target.Comment: 7 pages, 6 figure
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