5,520 research outputs found
Mesh-based 3D Textured Urban Mapping
In the era of autonomous driving, urban mapping represents a core step to let
vehicles interact with the urban context. Successful mapping algorithms have
been proposed in the last decade building the map leveraging on data from a
single sensor. The focus of the system presented in this paper is twofold: the
joint estimation of a 3D map from lidar data and images, based on a 3D mesh,
and its texturing. Indeed, even if most surveying vehicles for mapping are
endowed by cameras and lidar, existing mapping algorithms usually rely on
either images or lidar data; moreover both image-based and lidar-based systems
often represent the map as a point cloud, while a continuous textured mesh
representation would be useful for visualization and navigation purposes. In
the proposed framework, we join the accuracy of the 3D lidar data, and the
dense information and appearance carried by the images, in estimating a
visibility consistent map upon the lidar measurements, and refining it
photometrically through the acquired images. We evaluate the proposed framework
against the KITTI dataset and we show the performance improvement with respect
to two state of the art urban mapping algorithms, and two widely used surface
reconstruction algorithms in Computer Graphics.Comment: accepted at iros 201
LIDAR-Camera Fusion for Road Detection Using Fully Convolutional Neural Networks
In this work, a deep learning approach has been developed to carry out road
detection by fusing LIDAR point clouds and camera images. An unstructured and
sparse point cloud is first projected onto the camera image plane and then
upsampled to obtain a set of dense 2D images encoding spatial information.
Several fully convolutional neural networks (FCNs) are then trained to carry
out road detection, either by using data from a single sensor, or by using
three fusion strategies: early, late, and the newly proposed cross fusion.
Whereas in the former two fusion approaches, the integration of multimodal
information is carried out at a predefined depth level, the cross fusion FCN is
designed to directly learn from data where to integrate information; this is
accomplished by using trainable cross connections between the LIDAR and the
camera processing branches.
To further highlight the benefits of using a multimodal system for road
detection, a data set consisting of visually challenging scenes was extracted
from driving sequences of the KITTI raw data set. It was then demonstrated
that, as expected, a purely camera-based FCN severely underperforms on this
data set. A multimodal system, on the other hand, is still able to provide high
accuracy. Finally, the proposed cross fusion FCN was evaluated on the KITTI
road benchmark where it achieved excellent performance, with a MaxF score of
96.03%, ranking it among the top-performing approaches
Past, Present, and Future of Simultaneous Localization And Mapping: Towards the Robust-Perception Age
Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM)consists in the concurrent
construction of a model of the environment (the map), and the estimation of the
state of the robot moving within it. The SLAM community has made astonishing
progress over the last 30 years, enabling large-scale real-world applications,
and witnessing a steady transition of this technology to industry. We survey
the current state of SLAM. We start by presenting what is now the de-facto
standard formulation for SLAM. We then review related work, covering a broad
set of topics including robustness and scalability in long-term mapping, metric
and semantic representations for mapping, theoretical performance guarantees,
active SLAM and exploration, and other new frontiers. This paper simultaneously
serves as a position paper and tutorial to those who are users of SLAM. By
looking at the published research with a critical eye, we delineate open
challenges and new research issues, that still deserve careful scientific
investigation. The paper also contains the authors' take on two questions that
often animate discussions during robotics conferences: Do robots need SLAM? and
Is SLAM solved
3D Visual Perception for Self-Driving Cars using a Multi-Camera System: Calibration, Mapping, Localization, and Obstacle Detection
Cameras are a crucial exteroceptive sensor for self-driving cars as they are
low-cost and small, provide appearance information about the environment, and
work in various weather conditions. They can be used for multiple purposes such
as visual navigation and obstacle detection. We can use a surround multi-camera
system to cover the full 360-degree field-of-view around the car. In this way,
we avoid blind spots which can otherwise lead to accidents. To minimize the
number of cameras needed for surround perception, we utilize fisheye cameras.
Consequently, standard vision pipelines for 3D mapping, visual localization,
obstacle detection, etc. need to be adapted to take full advantage of the
availability of multiple cameras rather than treat each camera individually. In
addition, processing of fisheye images has to be supported. In this paper, we
describe the camera calibration and subsequent processing pipeline for
multi-fisheye-camera systems developed as part of the V-Charge project. This
project seeks to enable automated valet parking for self-driving cars. Our
pipeline is able to precisely calibrate multi-camera systems, build sparse 3D
maps for visual navigation, visually localize the car with respect to these
maps, generate accurate dense maps, as well as detect obstacles based on
real-time depth map extraction
Sparse-to-Continuous: Enhancing Monocular Depth Estimation using Occupancy Maps
This paper addresses the problem of single image depth estimation (SIDE),
focusing on improving the quality of deep neural network predictions. In a
supervised learning scenario, the quality of predictions is intrinsically
related to the training labels, which guide the optimization process. For
indoor scenes, structured-light-based depth sensors (e.g. Kinect) are able to
provide dense, albeit short-range, depth maps. On the other hand, for outdoor
scenes, LiDARs are considered the standard sensor, which comparatively provides
much sparser measurements, especially in areas further away. Rather than
modifying the neural network architecture to deal with sparse depth maps, this
article introduces a novel densification method for depth maps, using the
Hilbert Maps framework. A continuous occupancy map is produced based on 3D
points from LiDAR scans, and the resulting reconstructed surface is projected
into a 2D depth map with arbitrary resolution. Experiments conducted with
various subsets of the KITTI dataset show a significant improvement produced by
the proposed Sparse-to-Continuous technique, without the introduction of extra
information into the training stage.Comment: Accepted. (c) 2019 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted.
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