1,829 research outputs found
C-blox: A Scalable and Consistent TSDF-based Dense Mapping Approach
In many applications, maintaining a consistent dense map of the environment
is key to enabling robotic platforms to perform higher level decision making.
Several works have addressed the challenge of creating precise dense 3D maps
from visual sensors providing depth information. However, during operation over
longer missions, reconstructions can easily become inconsistent due to
accumulated camera tracking error and delayed loop closure. Without explicitly
addressing the problem of map consistency, recovery from such distortions tends
to be difficult. We present a novel system for dense 3D mapping which addresses
the challenge of building consistent maps while dealing with scalability.
Central to our approach is the representation of the environment as a
collection of overlapping TSDF subvolumes. These subvolumes are localized
through feature-based camera tracking and bundle adjustment. Our main
contribution is a pipeline for identifying stable regions in the map, and to
fuse the contributing subvolumes. This approach allows us to reduce map growth
while still maintaining consistency. We demonstrate the proposed system on a
publicly available dataset and simulation engine, and demonstrate the efficacy
of the proposed approach for building consistent and scalable maps. Finally we
demonstrate our approach running in real-time on-board a lightweight MAV.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures, conferenc
Topomap: Topological Mapping and Navigation Based on Visual SLAM Maps
Visual robot navigation within large-scale, semi-structured environments
deals with various challenges such as computation intensive path planning
algorithms or insufficient knowledge about traversable spaces. Moreover, many
state-of-the-art navigation approaches only operate locally instead of gaining
a more conceptual understanding of the planning objective. This limits the
complexity of tasks a robot can accomplish and makes it harder to deal with
uncertainties that are present in the context of real-time robotics
applications. In this work, we present Topomap, a framework which simplifies
the navigation task by providing a map to the robot which is tailored for path
planning use. This novel approach transforms a sparse feature-based map from a
visual Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM) system into a
three-dimensional topological map. This is done in two steps. First, we extract
occupancy information directly from the noisy sparse point cloud. Then, we
create a set of convex free-space clusters, which are the vertices of the
topological map. We show that this representation improves the efficiency of
global planning, and we provide a complete derivation of our algorithm.
Planning experiments on real world datasets demonstrate that we achieve similar
performance as RRT* with significantly lower computation times and storage
requirements. Finally, we test our algorithm on a mobile robotic platform to
prove its advantages.Comment: 8 page
Stochastic Bundle Adjustment for Efficient and Scalable 3D Reconstruction
Current bundle adjustment solvers such as the Levenberg-Marquardt (LM)
algorithm are limited by the bottleneck in solving the Reduced Camera System
(RCS) whose dimension is proportional to the camera number. When the problem is
scaled up, this step is neither efficient in computation nor manageable for a
single compute node. In this work, we propose a stochastic bundle adjustment
algorithm which seeks to decompose the RCS approximately inside the LM
iterations to improve the efficiency and scalability. It first reformulates the
quadratic programming problem of an LM iteration based on the clustering of the
visibility graph by introducing the equality constraints across clusters. Then,
we propose to relax it into a chance constrained problem and solve it through
sampled convex program. The relaxation is intended to eliminate the
interdependence between clusters embodied by the constraints, so that a large
RCS can be decomposed into independent linear sub-problems. Numerical
experiments on unordered Internet image sets and sequential SLAM image sets, as
well as distributed experiments on large-scale datasets, have demonstrated the
high efficiency and scalability of the proposed approach. Codes are released at
https://github.com/zlthinker/STBA.Comment: Accepted by ECCV 202
Scalable Estimation of Precision Maps in a MapReduce Framework
This paper presents a large-scale strip adjustment method for LiDAR mobile
mapping data, yielding highly precise maps. It uses several concepts to achieve
scalability. First, an efficient graph-based pre-segmentation is used, which
directly operates on LiDAR scan strip data, rather than on point clouds.
Second, observation equations are obtained from a dense matching, which is
formulated in terms of an estimation of a latent map. As a result of this
formulation, the number of observation equations is not quadratic, but rather
linear in the number of scan strips. Third, the dynamic Bayes network, which
results from all observation and condition equations, is partitioned into two
sub-networks. Consequently, the estimation matrices for all position and
orientation corrections are linear instead of quadratic in the number of
unknowns and can be solved very efficiently using an alternating least squares
approach. It is shown how this approach can be mapped to a standard key/value
MapReduce implementation, where each of the processing nodes operates
independently on small chunks of data, leading to essentially linear
scalability. Results are demonstrated for a dataset of one billion measured
LiDAR points and 278,000 unknowns, leading to maps with a precision of a few
millimeters.Comment: ACM SIGSPATIAL'16, October 31-November 03, 2016, Burlingame, CA, US
Skeletal camera network embedded structure-from-motion for 3D scene reconstruction from UAV images
Structure-from-Motion (SfM) techniques have been widely used for 3D scene reconstruction from multi-view images. However, due to the large computational costs of SfM methods there is a major challenge in processing highly overlapping images, e.g. images from unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV). This paper embeds a novel skeletal camera network (SCN) into SfM to enable efficient 3D scene reconstruction from a large set of UAV images. First, the flight control data are used within a weighted graph to construct a topologically connected camera network (TCN) to determine the spatial connections between UAV images. Second, the TCN is refined using a novel hierarchical degree bounded maximum spanning tree to generate a SCN, which contains a subset of edges from the TCN and ensures that each image is involved in at least a 3-view configuration. Third, the SCN is embedded into the SfM to produce a novel SCN-SfM method, which allows performing tie-point matching only for the actually connected image pairs. The proposed method was applied in three experiments with images from two fixed-wing UAVs and an octocopter UAV, respectively. In addition, the SCN-SfM method was compared to three other methods for image connectivity determination. The comparison shows a significant reduction in the number of matched images if our method is used, which leads to less computational costs. At the same time the achieved scene completeness and geometric accuracy are comparable
Semantic Mapping of Road Scenes
The problem of understanding road scenes has been on the fore-front in the computer vision community
for the last couple of years. This enables autonomous systems to navigate and understand
the surroundings in which it operates. It involves reconstructing the scene and estimating the objects
present in it, such as ‘vehicles’, ‘road’, ‘pavements’ and ‘buildings’. This thesis focusses on these
aspects and proposes solutions to address them.
First, we propose a solution to generate a dense semantic map from multiple street-level images.
This map can be imagined as the bird’s eye view of the region with associated semantic labels for
ten’s of kilometres of street level data. We generate the overhead semantic view from street level
images. This is in contrast to existing approaches using satellite/overhead imagery for classification
of urban region, allowing us to produce a detailed semantic map for a large scale urban area. Then
we describe a method to perform large scale dense 3D reconstruction of road scenes with associated
semantic labels. Our method fuses the depth-maps in an online fashion, generated from the
stereo pairs across time into a global 3D volume, in order to accommodate arbitrarily long image
sequences. The object class labels estimated from the street level stereo image sequence are used to
annotate the reconstructed volume. Then we exploit the scene structure in object class labelling by
performing inference over the meshed representation of the scene. By performing labelling over the
mesh we solve two issues: Firstly, images often have redundant information with multiple images
describing the same scene. Solving these images separately is slow, where our method is approximately
a magnitude faster in the inference stage compared to normal inference in the image domain.
Secondly, often multiple images, even though they describe the same scene result in inconsistent
labelling. By solving a single mesh, we remove the inconsistency of labelling across the images.
Also our mesh based labelling takes into account of the object layout in the scene, which is often
ambiguous in the image domain, thereby increasing the accuracy of object labelling. Finally, we perform
labelling and structure computation through a hierarchical robust PN Markov Random Field
defined on voxels and super-voxels given by an octree. This allows us to infer the 3D structure and
the object-class labels in a principled manner, through bounded approximate minimisation of a well
defined and studied energy functional. In this thesis, we also introduce two object labelled datasets
created from real world data. The 15 kilometre Yotta Labelled dataset consists of 8,000 images per
camera view of the roadways of the United Kingdom with a subset of them annotated with object
class labels and the second dataset is comprised of ground truth object labels for the publicly available
KITTI dataset. Both the datasets are available publicly and we hope will be helpful to the vision
research community
Stable Camera Motion Estimation Using Convex Programming
We study the inverse problem of estimating n locations (up to
global scale, translation and negation) in from noisy measurements of a
subset of the (unsigned) pairwise lines that connect them, that is, from noisy
measurements of for some pairs (i,j) (where the
signs are unknown). This problem is at the core of the structure from motion
(SfM) problem in computer vision, where the 's represent camera locations
in . The noiseless version of the problem, with exact line measurements,
has been considered previously under the general title of parallel rigidity
theory, mainly in order to characterize the conditions for unique realization
of locations. For noisy pairwise line measurements, current methods tend to
produce spurious solutions that are clustered around a few locations. This
sensitivity of the location estimates is a well-known problem in SfM,
especially for large, irregular collections of images.
In this paper we introduce a semidefinite programming (SDP) formulation,
specially tailored to overcome the clustering phenomenon. We further identify
the implications of parallel rigidity theory for the location estimation
problem to be well-posed, and prove exact (in the noiseless case) and stable
location recovery results. We also formulate an alternating direction method to
solve the resulting semidefinite program, and provide a distributed version of
our formulation for large numbers of locations. Specifically for the camera
location estimation problem, we formulate a pairwise line estimation method
based on robust camera orientation and subspace estimation. Lastly, we
demonstrate the utility of our algorithm through experiments on real images.Comment: 40 pages, 12 figures, 6 tables; notation and some unclear parts
updated, some typos correcte
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