312 research outputs found
GOGMA: Globally-Optimal Gaussian Mixture Alignment
Gaussian mixture alignment is a family of approaches that are frequently used
for robustly solving the point-set registration problem. However, since they
use local optimisation, they are susceptible to local minima and can only
guarantee local optimality. Consequently, their accuracy is strongly dependent
on the quality of the initialisation. This paper presents the first
globally-optimal solution to the 3D rigid Gaussian mixture alignment problem
under the L2 distance between mixtures. The algorithm, named GOGMA, employs a
branch-and-bound approach to search the space of 3D rigid motions SE(3),
guaranteeing global optimality regardless of the initialisation. The geometry
of SE(3) was used to find novel upper and lower bounds for the objective
function and local optimisation was integrated into the scheme to accelerate
convergence without voiding the optimality guarantee. The evaluation
empirically supported the optimality proof and showed that the method performed
much more robustly on two challenging datasets than an existing
globally-optimal registration solution.Comment: Manuscript in press 2016 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and
Pattern Recognitio
Robust and Optimal Methods for Geometric Sensor Data Alignment
Geometric sensor data alignment - the problem of finding the
rigid transformation that correctly aligns two sets of sensor
data without prior knowledge of how the data correspond - is a
fundamental task in computer vision and robotics. It is
inconvenient then that outliers and non-convexity are inherent to
the problem and present significant challenges for alignment
algorithms. Outliers are highly prevalent in sets of sensor data,
particularly when the sets overlap incompletely. Despite this,
many alignment objective functions are not robust to outliers,
leading to erroneous alignments. In addition, alignment problems
are highly non-convex, a property arising from the objective
function and the transformation. While finding a local optimum
may not be difficult, finding the global optimum is a hard
optimisation problem. These key challenges have not been fully
and jointly resolved in the existing literature, and so there is
a need for robust and optimal solutions to alignment problems.
Hence the objective of this thesis is to develop tractable
algorithms for geometric sensor data alignment that are robust to
outliers and not susceptible to spurious local optima.
This thesis makes several significant contributions to the
geometric alignment literature, founded on new insights into
robust alignment and the geometry of transformations. Firstly, a
novel discriminative sensor data representation is proposed that
has better viewpoint invariance than generative models and is
time and memory efficient without sacrificing model fidelity.
Secondly, a novel local optimisation algorithm is developed for
nD-nD geometric alignment under a robust distance measure. It
manifests a wider region of convergence and a greater robustness
to outliers and sampling artefacts than other local optimisation
algorithms. Thirdly, the first optimal solution for 3D-3D
geometric alignment with an inherently robust objective function
is proposed. It outperforms other geometric alignment algorithms
on challenging datasets due to its guaranteed optimality and
outlier robustness, and has an efficient parallel implementation.
Fourthly, the first optimal solution for 2D-3D geometric
alignment with an inherently robust objective function is
proposed. It outperforms existing approaches on challenging
datasets, reliably finding the global optimum, and has an
efficient parallel implementation. Finally, another optimal
solution is developed for 2D-3D geometric alignment, using a
robust surface alignment measure.
Ultimately, robust and optimal methods, such as those in this
thesis, are necessary to reliably find accurate solutions to
geometric sensor data alignment problems
Geometric modeling and optimization over regular domains for graphics and visual computing
The effective construction of parametric representation of complicated geometric objects can facilitate many design, analysis, and simulation tasks in Computer-Aided Design (CAD), Computer-Aided Manufacturing (CAM), and Computer-Aided Engineering (CAE). Given a 3D shape, the procedure of finding such a parametric representation upon a canonical domain is called geometric parameterization. Regular geometric regions, such as polycubes and spheres, are desirable domains for parameterization. Parametric representations defined upon regular geometric domains have many desirable mathematical properties and can facilitate or simplify various surface/solid modeling and processing computation. This dissertation studies the construction of parameterization on regular geometric domains and explores their applications in shape modeling and computer-aided design. Specifically, we studies (1) the surface parameterization on the spherical domain for closed genus-zero surfaces; (2) the surface parameterization on the polycube domain for general closed surfaces; and (3) the volumetric parameterization for 3D-manifolds embedded in 3D Euclidean space. We propose novel computational models to solve these geometric problems. Our computational models reduce to nonlinear optimizations with various geometric constraints. Hence, we also need to explore effective optimization algorithms. The main contributions of this dissertation are three-folded. (1) We developed an effective progressive spherical parameterization algorithm, with an efficient nonlinear optimization scheme subject to the spherical constraint. Compared with the state-of-the-art spherical mapping algorithms, our algorithm demonstrates the advantages of great efficiency, lower distortion, and guaranteed bijectiveness, and we show its applications in spherical harmonic decomposition and shape analysis. (2) We propose a first topology-preserving polycube domain optimization algorithm that simultaneously optimizes polycube domain together with the parameterization to balance the mapping distortion and domain simplicity. We develop effective nonlinear geometric optimization algorithms dealing with variables with and without derivatives. This polycube parameterization algorithm can benefit the regular quadrilateral mesh generation and cross-surface parameterization. (3) We develop a novel quaternion-based optimization framework for 3D frame field construction and volumetric parameterization computation. We demonstrate our constructed 3D frame field has better smoothness, compared with state-of-the-art algorithms, and is effective in guiding low-distortion volumetric parameterization and high-quality hexahedral mesh generation
Robust Rotation Synchronization via Low-rank and Sparse Matrix Decomposition
This paper deals with the rotation synchronization problem, which arises in
global registration of 3D point-sets and in structure from motion. The problem
is formulated in an unprecedented way as a "low-rank and sparse" matrix
decomposition that handles both outliers and missing data. A minimization
strategy, dubbed R-GoDec, is also proposed and evaluated experimentally against
state-of-the-art algorithms on simulated and real data. The results show that
R-GoDec is the fastest among the robust algorithms.Comment: The material contained in this paper is part of a manuscript
submitted to CVI
Why and How to Avoid the Flipped Quaternion Multiplication
Over the last decades quaternions have become a crucial and very successful
tool for attitude representation in robotics and aerospace. However, there is a
major problem that is continuously causing trouble in practice when it comes to
exchanging formulas or implementations: there are two quaternion
multiplications in common use, Hamilton's original multiplication and its
flipped version, which is often associated with NASA's Jet Propulsion
Laboratory. We believe that this particular issue is completely avoidable and
only exists today due to a lack of understanding. This paper explains the
underlying problem for the popular passive world to body usage of rotation
quaternions, and derives an alternative solution compatible with Hamilton's
multiplication. Furthermore, it argues for entirely discontinuing the flipped
multiplication. Additionally, it provides recipes for efficiently detecting
relevant conventions and migrating formulas or algorithms between them.Comment: 16 pages, 1 figure, 2 tables (minor improvements and fixes over v1,
smaller page margins
Robust online subspace learning
In this thesis, I aim to advance the theories of online non-linear subspace learning through the development of strategies which are both efficient and robust. The use of subspace learning methods is very popular in computer vision and they have been employed to numerous tasks. With the increasing need for real-time applications, the formulation of online (i.e. incremental and real-time) learning methods is a vibrant research field and has received much attention from the research community. A major advantage of incremental systems is that they update the hypothesis during execution, thus allowing for the incorporation of the real data seen in the testing phase. Tracking acts as an attractive and popular evaluation tool for incremental systems, and thus, the connection between online learning and adaptive tracking is seen commonly in the literature. The proposed system in this thesis facilitates learning from noisy input data, e.g. caused by occlusions, casted shadows and pose variations, that are challenging problems in general tracking frameworks.
First, a fast and robust alternative to standard L2-norm principal component analysis (PCA) is introduced, which I coin Euler PCA (e-PCA). The formulation of e-PCA is based on robust, non-linear kernel PCA (KPCA) with a cosine-based kernel function that is expressed via an explicit feature space. When applied to tracking, face reconstruction and background modeling, promising results are achieved.
In the second part, the problem of matching vectors of 3D rotations is explicitly targeted. A novel distance which is robust for 3D rotations is introduced, and formulated as a kernel function. The kernel leads to a new representation of 3D rotations, the full-angle quaternion (FAQ) representation. Finally, I propose 3D object recognition from point clouds, and object tracking with color values using FAQs.
A domain-specific kernel function designed for visual data is then presented. KPCA with Krein space kernels is introduced, as this kernel is indefinite, and an exact incremental learning framework for the new kernel is developed. In a tracker framework, the presented online learning outperforms the competitors in nine popular and challenging video sequences.
In the final part, the generalized eigenvalue problem is studied. Specifically, incremental slow feature analysis (SFA) with indefinite kernels is proposed, and applied to temporal video segmentation and tracking with change detection. As online SFA allows for drift detection, further improvements are achieved in the evaluation of the tracking task.Open Acces
- …