3D environment mapping using the Kinect V2 and path planning based on RRT algorithms

This paper describes a 3D path planning system that is able to provide a solution trajectory for the automatic control of a robot. The proposed system uses a point cloud obtained from the robot workspace, with a Kinect V2 sensor to identify the interest regions and the obstacles of the environment. Our proposal includes a collision-free path planner based on the Rapidly-exploring Random Trees variant (RRT*), for a safe and optimal navigation of robots in 3D spaces. Results on RGB-D segmentation and recognition, point cloud processing, and comparisons between different RRT* algorithms, are presented.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Convolutional Color Constancy

Color constancy is the problem of inferring the color of the light that illuminated a scene, usually so that the illumination color can be removed. Because this problem is underconstrained, it is often solved by modeling the statistical regularities of the colors of natural objects and illumination. In contrast, in this paper we reformulate the problem of color constancy as a 2D spatial localization task in a log-chrominance space, thereby allowing us to apply techniques from object detection and structured prediction to the color constancy problem. By directly learning how to discriminate between correctly white-balanced images and poorly white-balanced images, our model is able to improve performance on standard benchmarks by nearly 40%

A Framework for Symmetric Part Detection in Cluttered Scenes

The role of symmetry in computer vision has waxed and waned in importance during the evolution of the field from its earliest days. At first figuring prominently in support of bottom-up indexing, it fell out of favor as shape gave way to appearance and recognition gave way to detection. With a strong prior in the form of a target object, the role of the weaker priors offered by perceptual grouping was greatly diminished. However, as the field returns to the problem of recognition from a large database, the bottom-up recovery of the parts that make up the objects in a cluttered scene is critical for their recognition. The medial axis community has long exploited the ubiquitous regularity of symmetry as a basis for the decomposition of a closed contour into medial parts. However, today's recognition systems are faced with cluttered scenes, and the assumption that a closed contour exists, i.e. that figure-ground segmentation has been solved, renders much of the medial axis community's work inapplicable. In this article, we review a computational framework, previously reported in Lee et al. (2013), Levinshtein et al. (2009, 2013), that bridges the representation power of the medial axis and the need to recover and group an object's parts in a cluttered scene. Our framework is rooted in the idea that a maximally inscribed disc, the building block of a medial axis, can be modeled as a compact superpixel in the image. We evaluate the method on images of cluttered scenes.Comment: 10 pages, 8 figure

Event-based Vision: A Survey

Event cameras are bio-inspired sensors that differ from conventional frame cameras: Instead of capturing images at a fixed rate, they asynchronously measure per-pixel brightness changes, and output a stream of events that encode the time, location and sign of the brightness changes. Event cameras offer attractive properties compared to traditional cameras: high temporal resolution (in the order of microseconds), very high dynamic range (140 dB vs. 60 dB), low power consumption, and high pixel bandwidth (on the order of kHz) resulting in reduced motion blur. Hence, event cameras have a large potential for robotics and computer vision in challenging scenarios for traditional cameras, such as low-latency, high speed, and high dynamic range. However, novel methods are required to process the unconventional output of these sensors in order to unlock their potential. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of the emerging field of event-based vision, with a focus on the applications and the algorithms developed to unlock the outstanding properties of event cameras. We present event cameras from their working principle, the actual sensors that are available and the tasks that they have been used for, from low-level vision (feature detection and tracking, optic flow, etc.) to high-level vision (reconstruction, segmentation, recognition). We also discuss the techniques developed to process events, including learning-based techniques, as well as specialized processors for these novel sensors, such as spiking neural networks. Additionally, we highlight the challenges that remain to be tackled and the opportunities that lie ahead in the search for a more efficient, bio-inspired way for machines to perceive and interact with the world

Fast Graph-Based Object Segmentation for RGB-D Images

Object segmentation is an important capability for robotic systems, in particular for grasping. We present a graph- based approach for the segmentation of simple objects from RGB-D images. We are interested in segmenting objects with large variety in appearance, from lack of texture to strong textures, for the task of robotic grasping. The algorithm does not rely on image features or machine learning. We propose a modified Canny edge detector for extracting robust edges by using depth information and two simple cost functions for combining color and depth cues. The cost functions are used to build an undirected graph, which is partitioned using the concept of internal and external differences between graph regions. The partitioning is fast with O(NlogN) complexity. We also discuss ways to deal with missing depth information. We test the approach on different publicly available RGB-D object datasets, such as the Rutgers APC RGB-D dataset and the RGB-D Object Dataset, and compare the results with other existing methods

Vision-Based Road Detection in Automotive Systems: A Real-Time Expectation-Driven Approach

The main aim of this work is the development of a vision-based road detection system fast enough to cope with the difficult real-time constraints imposed by moving vehicle applications. The hardware platform, a special-purpose massively parallel system, has been chosen to minimize system production and operational costs. This paper presents a novel approach to expectation-driven low-level image segmentation, which can be mapped naturally onto mesh-connected massively parallel SIMD architectures capable of handling hierarchical data structures. The input image is assumed to contain a distorted version of a given template; a multiresolution stretching process is used to reshape the original template in accordance with the acquired image content, minimizing a potential function. The distorted template is the process output.Comment: See http://www.jair.org/ for any accompanying file