868 research outputs found
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
Structure from Motion with Higher-level Environment Representations
Computer vision is an important area focusing on understanding,
extracting and using the information from vision-based sensor. It
has many applications such as vision-based 3D reconstruction,
simultaneous localization and mapping(SLAM) and data-driven
understanding of the real world. Vision is a fundamental sensing
modality in many different fields of application.
While the traditional structure from motion mostly uses sparse
point-based feature, this thesis aims to explore the possibility
of using higher order feature representation. It starts with a
joint work which uses straight line for feature representation
and performs bundle adjustment with straight line
parameterization. Then, we further try an even higher order
representation where we use Bezier spline for parameterization.
We start with a simple case where all contours are lying on the
plane and uses Bezier splines to parametrize the curves in the
background and optimize on both camera position and Bezier
splines. For application, we present a complete end-to-end
pipeline which produces meaningful dense 3D models from natural
data of a 3D object: the target object is placed on a structured
but unknown planar background that is modeled with splines. The
data is captured using only a hand-held monocular camera.
However, this application is limited to a planar scenario and we
manage to push the parameterizations into real 3D. Following the
potential of this idea, we introduce a more flexible higher-order
extension of points that provide a general model for structural
edges in the environment, no matter if straight or curved. Our
model relies on linked B´ezier curves, the geometric intuition
of which proves great benefits during parameter initialization
and regularization. We present the
first fully automatic pipeline that is able to generate
spline-based representations without any human supervision.
Besides a full graphical formulation of the problem, we introduce
both geometric and photometric cues as well as higher-level
concepts such overall curve visibility and viewing angle
restrictions to automatically manage the correspondences in the
graph. Results prove that curve-based structure from motion with
splines is able to outperform state-of-the-art sparse
feature-based methods, as well as to model curved edges in the
environment
Event-based Simultaneous Localization and Mapping: A Comprehensive Survey
In recent decades, visual simultaneous localization and mapping (vSLAM) has
gained significant interest in both academia and industry. It estimates camera
motion and reconstructs the environment concurrently using visual sensors on a
moving robot. However, conventional cameras are limited by hardware, including
motion blur and low dynamic range, which can negatively impact performance in
challenging scenarios like high-speed motion and high dynamic range
illumination. Recent studies have demonstrated that event cameras, a new type
of bio-inspired visual sensor, offer advantages such as high temporal
resolution, dynamic range, low power consumption, and low latency. This paper
presents a timely and comprehensive review of event-based vSLAM algorithms that
exploit the benefits of asynchronous and irregular event streams for
localization and mapping tasks. The review covers the working principle of
event cameras and various event representations for preprocessing event data.
It also categorizes event-based vSLAM methods into four main categories:
feature-based, direct, motion-compensation, and deep learning methods, with
detailed discussions and practical guidance for each approach. Furthermore, the
paper evaluates the state-of-the-art methods on various benchmarks,
highlighting current challenges and future opportunities in this emerging
research area. A public repository will be maintained to keep track of the
rapid developments in this field at
{\url{https://github.com/kun150kun/ESLAM-survey}}
Visual Perception For Robotic Spatial Understanding
Humans understand the world through vision without much effort. We perceive the structure, objects, and people in the environment and pay little direct attention to most of it, until it becomes useful. Intelligent systems, especially mobile robots, have no such biologically engineered vision mechanism to take for granted. In contrast, we must devise algorithmic methods of taking raw sensor data and converting it to something useful very quickly. Vision is such a necessary part of building a robot or any intelligent system that is meant to interact with the world that it is somewhat surprising we don\u27t have off-the-shelf libraries for this capability.
Why is this? The simple answer is that the problem is extremely difficult. There has been progress, but the current state of the art is impressive and depressing at the same time. We now have neural networks that can recognize many objects in 2D images, in some cases performing better than a human. Some algorithms can also provide bounding boxes or pixel-level masks to localize the object. We have visual odometry and mapping algorithms that can build reasonably detailed maps over long distances with the right hardware and conditions. On the other hand, we have robots with many sensors and no efficient way to compute their relative extrinsic poses for integrating the data in a single frame. The same networks that produce good object segmentations and labels in a controlled benchmark still miss obvious objects in the real world and have no mechanism for learning on the fly while the robot is exploring. Finally, while we can detect pose for very specific objects, we don\u27t yet have a mechanism that detects pose that generalizes well over categories or that can describe new objects efficiently.
We contribute algorithms in four of the areas mentioned above. First, we describe a practical and effective system for calibrating many sensors on a robot with up to 3 different modalities. Second, we present our approach to visual odometry and mapping that exploits the unique capabilities of RGB-D sensors to efficiently build detailed representations of an environment. Third, we describe a 3-D over-segmentation technique that utilizes the models and ego-motion output in the previous step to generate temporally consistent segmentations with camera motion. Finally, we develop a synthesized dataset of chair objects with part labels and investigate the influence of parts on RGB-D based object pose recognition using a novel network architecture we call PartNet
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