Registration and Recognition in 3D

The simplest Computer Vision algorithm can tell you what color it sees when you point it at an object, but asking that computer what it is looking at is a much harder problem. Camera and LiDAR (Light Detection And Ranging) sensors generally provide streams pixel of values and sophisticated algorithms must be engineered to recognize objects or the environment. There has been significant effort expended by the computer vision community on recognizing objects in color images; however, LiDAR sensors, which sense depth values for pixels instead of color, have been studied less. Recently we have seen a renewed interest in depth data with the democratization provided by consumer depth cameras. Detecting objects in depth data is more challenging in some ways because of the lack of texture and increased complexity of processing unordered point sets. We present three systems that contribute to solving the object recognition problem from the LiDAR perspective. They are: calibration, registration, and object recognition systems. We propose a novel calibration system that works with both line and raster based LiDAR sensors, and calibrates them with respect to image cameras. Our system can be extended to calibrate LiDAR sensors that do not give intensity information. We demonstrate a novel system that produces registrations between different LiDAR scans by transforming the input point cloud into a Constellation Extended Gaussian Image (CEGI) and then uses this CEGI to estimate the rotational alignment of the scans independently. Finally we present a method for object recognition which uses local (Spin Images) and global (CEGI) information to recognize cars in a large urban dataset. We present real world results from these three systems. Compelling experiments show that object recognition systems can gain much information using only 3D geometry. There are many object recognition and navigation algorithms that work on images; the work we propose in this thesis is more complimentary to those image based methods than competitive. This is an important step along the way to more intelligent robots

Improved depth recovery in consumer depth cameras via disparity space fusion within cross-spectral stereo.

We address the issue of improving depth coverage in consumer depth cameras based on the combined use of cross-spectral stereo and near infra-red structured light sensing. Specifically we show that fusion of disparity over these modalities, within the disparity space image, prior to disparity optimization facilitates the recovery of scene depth information in regions where structured light sensing fails. We show that this joint approach, leveraging disparity information from both structured light and cross-spectral sensing, facilitates the joint recovery of global scene depth comprising both texture-less object depth, where conventional stereo otherwise fails, and highly reflective object depth, where structured light (and similar) active sensing commonly fails. The proposed solution is illustrated using dense gradient feature matching and shown to outperform prior approaches that use late-stage fused cross-spectral stereo depth as a facet of improved sensing for consumer depth cameras

RGB-D datasets using microsoft kinect or similar sensors: a survey

RGB-D data has turned out to be a very useful representation of an indoor scene for solving fundamental computer vision problems. It takes the advantages of the color image that provides appearance information of an object and also the depth image that is immune to the variations in color, illumination, rotation angle and scale. With the invention of the low-cost Microsoft Kinect sensor, which was initially used for gaming and later became a popular device for computer vision, high quality RGB-D data can be acquired easily. In recent years, more and more RGB-D image/video datasets dedicated to various applications have become available, which are of great importance to benchmark the state-of-the-art. In this paper, we systematically survey popular RGB-D datasets for different applications including object recognition, scene classification, hand gesture recognition, 3D-simultaneous localization and mapping, and pose estimation. We provide the insights into the characteristics of each important dataset, and compare the popularity and the difficulty of those datasets. Overall, the main goal of this survey is to give a comprehensive description about the available RGB-D datasets and thus to guide researchers in the selection of suitable datasets for evaluating their algorithms

3D scanning of cultural heritage with consumer depth cameras

Three dimensional reconstruction of cultural heritage objects is an expensive and time-consuming process. Recent consumer real-time depth acquisition devices, like Microsoft Kinect, allow very fast and simple acquisition of 3D views. However 3D scanning with such devices is a challenging task due to the limited accuracy and reliability of the acquired data. This paper introduces a 3D reconstruction pipeline suited to use consumer depth cameras as hand-held scanners for cultural heritage objects. Several new contributions have been made to achieve this result. They include an ad-hoc filtering scheme that exploits the model of the error on the acquired data and a novel algorithm for the extraction of salient points exploiting both depth and color data. Then the salient points are used within a modified version of the ICP algorithm that exploits both geometry and color distances to precisely align the views even when geometry information is not sufficient to constrain the registration. The proposed method, although applicable to generic scenes, has been tuned to the acquisition of sculptures and in this connection its performance is rather interesting as the experimental results indicate