Scan matching by cross-correlation and differential evolution

Scan matching is an important task, solved in the context of many high-level problems including pose estimation, indoor localization, simultaneous localization and mapping and others. Methods that are accurate and adaptive and at the same time computationally efficient are required to enable location-based services in autonomous mobile devices. Such devices usually have a wide range of high-resolution sensors but only a limited processing power and constrained energy supply. This work introduces a novel high-level scan matching strategy that uses a combination of two advanced algorithms recently used in this field: cross-correlation and differential evolution. The cross-correlation between two laser range scans is used as an efficient measure of scan alignment and the differential evolution algorithm is used to search for the parameters of a transformation that aligns the scans. The proposed method was experimentally validated and showed good ability to match laser range scans taken shortly after each other and an excellent ability to match laser range scans taken with longer time intervals between them.Web of Science88art. no. 85

Frustum PointNets for 3D Object Detection from RGB-D Data

In this work, we study 3D object detection from RGB-D data in both indoor and outdoor scenes. While previous methods focus on images or 3D voxels, often obscuring natural 3D patterns and invariances of 3D data, we directly operate on raw point clouds by popping up RGB-D scans. However, a key challenge of this approach is how to efficiently localize objects in point clouds of large-scale scenes (region proposal). Instead of solely relying on 3D proposals, our method leverages both mature 2D object detectors and advanced 3D deep learning for object localization, achieving efficiency as well as high recall for even small objects. Benefited from learning directly in raw point clouds, our method is also able to precisely estimate 3D bounding boxes even under strong occlusion or with very sparse points. Evaluated on KITTI and SUN RGB-D 3D detection benchmarks, our method outperforms the state of the art by remarkable margins while having real-time capability.Comment: 15 pages, 12 figures, 14 table

Radar-on-Lidar: metric radar localization on prior lidar maps

Radar and lidar, provided by two different range sensors, each has pros and cons of various perception tasks on mobile robots or autonomous driving. In this paper, a Monte Carlo system is used to localize the robot with a rotating radar sensor on 2D lidar maps. We first train a conditional generative adversarial network to transfer raw radar data to lidar data, and achieve reliable radar points from generator. Then an efficient radar odometry is included in the Monte Carlo system. Combining the initial guess from odometry, a measurement model is proposed to match the radar data and prior lidar maps for final 2D positioning. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed localization framework on the public multi-session dataset. The experimental results show that our system can achieve high accuracy for long-term localization in outdoor scenes

Joint 3D Proposal Generation and Object Detection from View Aggregation

We present AVOD, an Aggregate View Object Detection network for autonomous driving scenarios. The proposed neural network architecture uses LIDAR point clouds and RGB images to generate features that are shared by two subnetworks: a region proposal network (RPN) and a second stage detector network. The proposed RPN uses a novel architecture capable of performing multimodal feature fusion on high resolution feature maps to generate reliable 3D object proposals for multiple object classes in road scenes. Using these proposals, the second stage detection network performs accurate oriented 3D bounding box regression and category classification to predict the extents, orientation, and classification of objects in 3D space. Our proposed architecture is shown to produce state of the art results on the KITTI 3D object detection benchmark while running in real time with a low memory footprint, making it a suitable candidate for deployment on autonomous vehicles. Code is at: https://github.com/kujason/avodComment: For any inquiries contact aharakeh(at)uwaterloo(dot)c

3D Object Detection Using Scale Invariant and Feature Reweighting Networks

3D object detection plays an important role in a large number of real-world applications. It requires us to estimate the localizations and the orientations of 3D objects in real scenes. In this paper, we present a new network architecture which focuses on utilizing the front view images and frustum point clouds to generate 3D detection results. On the one hand, a PointSIFT module is utilized to improve the performance of 3D segmentation. It can capture the information from different orientations in space and the robustness to different scale shapes. On the other hand, our network obtains the useful features and suppresses the features with less information by a SENet module. This module reweights channel features and estimates the 3D bounding boxes more effectively. Our method is evaluated on both KITTI dataset for outdoor scenes and SUN-RGBD dataset for indoor scenes. The experimental results illustrate that our method achieves better performance than the state-of-the-art methods especially when point clouds are highly sparse.Comment: The Thirty-Third AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-19