1,628 research outputs found
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
Supervised Autonomous Locomotion and Manipulation for Disaster Response with a Centaur-like Robot
Mobile manipulation tasks are one of the key challenges in the field of
search and rescue (SAR) robotics requiring robots with flexible locomotion and
manipulation abilities. Since the tasks are mostly unknown in advance, the
robot has to adapt to a wide variety of terrains and workspaces during a
mission. The centaur-like robot Centauro has a hybrid legged-wheeled base and
an anthropomorphic upper body to carry out complex tasks in environments too
dangerous for humans. Due to its high number of degrees of freedom, controlling
the robot with direct teleoperation approaches is challenging and exhausting.
Supervised autonomy approaches are promising to increase quality and speed of
control while keeping the flexibility to solve unknown tasks. We developed a
set of operator assistance functionalities with different levels of autonomy to
control the robot for challenging locomotion and manipulation tasks. The
integrated system was evaluated in disaster response scenarios and showed
promising performance.Comment: In Proceedings of IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent
Robots and Systems (IROS), Madrid, Spain, October 201
Self-supervised Multi-level Face Model Learning for Monocular Reconstruction at over 250 Hz
The reconstruction of dense 3D models of face geometry and appearance from a
single image is highly challenging and ill-posed. To constrain the problem,
many approaches rely on strong priors, such as parametric face models learned
from limited 3D scan data. However, prior models restrict generalization of the
true diversity in facial geometry, skin reflectance and illumination. To
alleviate this problem, we present the first approach that jointly learns 1) a
regressor for face shape, expression, reflectance and illumination on the basis
of 2) a concurrently learned parametric face model. Our multi-level face model
combines the advantage of 3D Morphable Models for regularization with the
out-of-space generalization of a learned corrective space. We train end-to-end
on in-the-wild images without dense annotations by fusing a convolutional
encoder with a differentiable expert-designed renderer and a self-supervised
training loss, both defined at multiple detail levels. Our approach compares
favorably to the state-of-the-art in terms of reconstruction quality, better
generalizes to real world faces, and runs at over 250 Hz.Comment: CVPR 2018 (Oral). Project webpage:
https://gvv.mpi-inf.mpg.de/projects/FML
Lifting GIS Maps into Strong Geometric Context for Scene Understanding
Contextual information can have a substantial impact on the performance of
visual tasks such as semantic segmentation, object detection, and geometric
estimation. Data stored in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) offers a rich
source of contextual information that has been largely untapped by computer
vision. We propose to leverage such information for scene understanding by
combining GIS resources with large sets of unorganized photographs using
Structure from Motion (SfM) techniques. We present a pipeline to quickly
generate strong 3D geometric priors from 2D GIS data using SfM models aligned
with minimal user input. Given an image resectioned against this model, we
generate robust predictions of depth, surface normals, and semantic labels. We
show that the precision of the predicted geometry is substantially more
accurate other single-image depth estimation methods. We then demonstrate the
utility of these contextual constraints for re-scoring pedestrian detections,
and use these GIS contextual features alongside object detection score maps to
improve a CRF-based semantic segmentation framework, boosting accuracy over
baseline models
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