88 research outputs found
Robust Stereo Visual Odometry through a Probabilistic Combination of Points and Line Segments
Most approaches to stereo visual odometry reconstruct the motion based on the tracking of point features along a sequence of images. However, in low-textured scenes it is often difficult to encounter a large set of point features, or it may happen that they are not well distributed over the image, so that the behavior of these algorithms deteriorates. This paper proposes a probabilistic approach to stereo visual odometry based on the combination of both point and line segment that works robustly in a wide variety of scenarios. The camera motion is recovered through non-linear minimization of the projection errors of both point and line segment features. In order to effectively combine both types of features, their associated errors are weighted according to their covariance matrices, computed from the propagation of Gaussian distribution errors in the sensor measurements. The method, of course, is computationally more expensive that using only one type of feature, but still can run in real-time on a standard computer and provides interesting advantages, including a straightforward integration into any probabilistic framework commonly employed in mobile robotics.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech. Project "PROMOVE: Advances in mobile robotics for promoting independent life of elders", funded by the Spanish Government and the "European Regional Development Fund ERDF" under contract DPI2014-55826-R
Featureless visual processing for SLAM in changing outdoor environments
Vision-based SLAM is mostly a solved problem providing clear, sharp images can be obtained. However, in outdoor environments a number of factors such as rough terrain, high speeds and hardware limitations can result in these conditions not being met. High speed transit on rough terrain can lead to image blur and under/over exposure, problems that cannot easily be dealt with using low cost hardware. Furthermore, recently there has been a growth in interest in lifelong autonomy for robots, which brings with it the challenge in outdoor environments of dealing with a moving sun and lack of constant artificial lighting. In this paper, we present a lightweight approach to visual localization and visual odometry that addresses the challenges posed by perceptual change and low cost cameras. The approach combines low resolution imagery with the SLAM algorithm, RatSLAM. We test the system using a cheap consumer camera mounted on a small vehicle in a mixed urban and vegetated environment, at times ranging from dawn to dusk and in conditions ranging from sunny weather to rain. We first show that the system is able to provide reliable mapping and recall over the course of the day and incrementally incorporate new visual scenes from different times into an existing map. We then restrict the system to only learning visual scenes at one time of day, and show that the system is still able to localize and map at other times of day. The results demonstrate the viability of the approach in situations where image quality is poor and environmental or hardware factors preclude the use of visual features
Direct Monocular Odometry Using Points and Lines
Most visual odometry algorithm for a monocular camera focuses on points,
either by feature matching, or direct alignment of pixel intensity, while
ignoring a common but important geometry entity: edges. In this paper, we
propose an odometry algorithm that combines points and edges to benefit from
the advantages of both direct and feature based methods. It works better in
texture-less environments and is also more robust to lighting changes and fast
motion by increasing the convergence basin. We maintain a depth map for the
keyframe then in the tracking part, the camera pose is recovered by minimizing
both the photometric error and geometric error to the matched edge in a
probabilistic framework. In the mapping part, edge is used to speed up and
increase stereo matching accuracy. On various public datasets, our algorithm
achieves better or comparable performance than state-of-the-art monocular
odometry methods. In some challenging texture-less environments, our algorithm
reduces the state estimation error over 50%.Comment: ICRA 201
Development of modern methods for the diagnostics of murals in architectural monuments
The paper studies monitoring of the state of murals, retrieval of data pertaining to this state and management and storing of the said data. The possibility of integration of traditional methods of mural mapping and modern methods of data visualization, including new Google Project Tango device technology for fixation of complex textures of inner 3D volumes of architectural monuments has been investigated (for instance Assumption Cathedral).
We further discuss the express-scanning of automated cartogramming for further comparison of states and methods of assessing the damage done to the mural. Results indicate that additional work is needed to improve the precision of the method.peer-reviewe
Learning to Navigate the Energy Landscape
In this paper, we present a novel and efficient architecture for addressing
computer vision problems that use `Analysis by Synthesis'. Analysis by
synthesis involves the minimization of the reconstruction error which is
typically a non-convex function of the latent target variables.
State-of-the-art methods adopt a hybrid scheme where discriminatively trained
predictors like Random Forests or Convolutional Neural Networks are used to
initialize local search algorithms. While these methods have been shown to
produce promising results, they often get stuck in local optima. Our method
goes beyond the conventional hybrid architecture by not only proposing multiple
accurate initial solutions but by also defining a navigational structure over
the solution space that can be used for extremely efficient gradient-free local
search. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach on the challenging problem
of RGB Camera Relocalization. To make the RGB camera relocalization problem
particularly challenging, we introduce a new dataset of 3D environments which
are significantly larger than those found in other publicly-available datasets.
Our experiments reveal that the proposed method is able to achieve
state-of-the-art camera relocalization results. We also demonstrate the
generalizability of our approach on Hand Pose Estimation and Image Retrieval
tasks
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
CNN-SLAM: Real-time dense monocular SLAM with learned depth prediction
Given the recent advances in depth prediction from Convolutional Neural
Networks (CNNs), this paper investigates how predicted depth maps from a deep
neural network can be deployed for accurate and dense monocular reconstruction.
We propose a method where CNN-predicted dense depth maps are naturally fused
together with depth measurements obtained from direct monocular SLAM. Our
fusion scheme privileges depth prediction in image locations where monocular
SLAM approaches tend to fail, e.g. along low-textured regions, and vice-versa.
We demonstrate the use of depth prediction for estimating the absolute scale of
the reconstruction, hence overcoming one of the major limitations of monocular
SLAM. Finally, we propose a framework to efficiently fuse semantic labels,
obtained from a single frame, with dense SLAM, yielding semantically coherent
scene reconstruction from a single view. Evaluation results on two benchmark
datasets show the robustness and accuracy of our approach.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figures, IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer
Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), Hawaii, USA, June, 2017. The first two
authors contribute equally to this pape
- …