8,908 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
Combining LiDAR Space Clustering and Convolutional Neural Networks for Pedestrian Detection
Pedestrian detection is an important component for safety of autonomous
vehicles, as well as for traffic and street surveillance. There are extensive
benchmarks on this topic and it has been shown to be a challenging problem when
applied on real use-case scenarios. In purely image-based pedestrian detection
approaches, the state-of-the-art results have been achieved with convolutional
neural networks (CNN) and surprisingly few detection frameworks have been built
upon multi-cue approaches. In this work, we develop a new pedestrian detector
for autonomous vehicles that exploits LiDAR data, in addition to visual
information. In the proposed approach, LiDAR data is utilized to generate
region proposals by processing the three dimensional point cloud that it
provides. These candidate regions are then further processed by a
state-of-the-art CNN classifier that we have fine-tuned for pedestrian
detection. We have extensively evaluated the proposed detection process on the
KITTI dataset. The experimental results show that the proposed LiDAR space
clustering approach provides a very efficient way of generating region
proposals leading to higher recall rates and fewer misses for pedestrian
detection. This indicates that LiDAR data can provide auxiliary information for
CNN-based approaches
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
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