Efficient Belief Propagation for Perception and Manipulation in Clutter

Autonomous service robots are required to perform tasks in common human indoor environments. To achieve goals associated with these tasks, the robot should continually perceive, reason its environment, and plan to manipulate objects, which we term as goal-directed manipulation. Perception remains the most challenging aspect of all stages, as common indoor environments typically pose problems in recognizing objects under inherent occlusions with physical interactions among themselves. Despite recent progress in the field of robot perception, accommodating perceptual uncertainty due to partial observations remains challenging and needs to be addressed to achieve the desired autonomy. In this dissertation, we address the problem of perception under uncertainty for robot manipulation in cluttered environments using generative inference methods. Specifically, we aim to enable robots to perceive partially observable environments by maintaining an approximate probability distribution as a belief over possible scene hypotheses. This belief representation captures uncertainty resulting from inter-object occlusions and physical interactions, which are inherently present in clutterred indoor environments. The research efforts presented in this thesis are towards developing appropriate state representations and inference techniques to generate and maintain such belief over contextually plausible scene states. We focus on providing the following features to generative inference while addressing the challenges due to occlusions: 1) generating and maintaining plausible scene hypotheses, 2) reducing the inference search space that typically grows exponentially with respect to the number of objects in a scene, 3) preserving scene hypotheses over continual observations. To generate and maintain plausible scene hypotheses, we propose physics informed scene estimation methods that combine a Newtonian physics engine within a particle based generative inference framework. The proposed variants of our method with and without a Monte Carlo step showed promising results on generating and maintaining plausible hypotheses under complete occlusions. We show that estimating such scenarios would not be possible by the commonly adopted 3D registration methods without the notion of a physical context that our method provides. To scale up the context informed inference to accommodate a larger number of objects, we describe a factorization of scene state into object and object-parts to perform collaborative particle-based inference. This resulted in the Pull Message Passing for Nonparametric Belief Propagation (PMPNBP) algorithm that caters to the demands of the high-dimensional multimodal nature of cluttered scenes while being computationally tractable. We demonstrate that PMPNBP is orders of magnitude faster than the state-of-the-art Nonparametric Belief Propagation method. Additionally, we show that PMPNBP successfully estimates poses of articulated objects under various simulated occlusion scenarios. To extend our PMPNBP algorithm for tracking object states over continuous observations, we explore ways to propose and preserve hypotheses effectively over time. This resulted in an augmentation-selection method, where hypotheses are drawn from various proposals followed by the selection of a subset using PMPNBP that explained the current state of the objects. We discuss and analyze our augmentation-selection method with its counterparts in belief propagation literature. Furthermore, we develop an inference pipeline for pose estimation and tracking of articulated objects in clutter. In this pipeline, the message passing module with the augmentation-selection method is informed by segmentation heatmaps from a trained neural network. In our experiments, we show that our proposed pipeline can effectively maintain belief and track articulated objects over a sequence of observations under occlusion.PHDComputer Science & EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/163159/1/kdesingh_1.pd

Learning from Millions of 3D Scans for Large-scale 3D Face Recognition

Deep networks trained on millions of facial images are believed to be closely approaching human-level performance in face recognition. However, open world face recognition still remains a challenge. Although, 3D face recognition has an inherent edge over its 2D counterpart, it has not benefited from the recent developments in deep learning due to the unavailability of large training as well as large test datasets. Recognition accuracies have already saturated on existing 3D face datasets due to their small gallery sizes. Unlike 2D photographs, 3D facial scans cannot be sourced from the web causing a bottleneck in the development of deep 3D face recognition networks and datasets. In this backdrop, we propose a method for generating a large corpus of labeled 3D face identities and their multiple instances for training and a protocol for merging the most challenging existing 3D datasets for testing. We also propose the first deep CNN model designed specifically for 3D face recognition and trained on 3.1 Million 3D facial scans of 100K identities. Our test dataset comprises 1,853 identities with a single 3D scan in the gallery and another 31K scans as probes, which is several orders of magnitude larger than existing ones. Without fine tuning on this dataset, our network already outperforms state of the art face recognition by over 10%. We fine tune our network on the gallery set to perform end-to-end large scale 3D face recognition which further improves accuracy. Finally, we show the efficacy of our method for the open world face recognition problem.Comment: 11 page

Facial Landmark Detection and Estimation under Various Expressions and Occlusions

Landmark localization is one of the fundamental approaches to facial expressions recognition, occlusions detection and face alignments. It plays a vital role in many applications in image processing and computer vision. The acquisition conditions such as expression, occlusion and background complexity affect the landmark localization performance, which subsequently lead to system failure. In this paper, the writers bestowed the challenges of various landmark detection techniques, number of landmark points and dataset types been employed from the existing literatures. However, advance technique for facial landmark detection under various expressions and occlusions was presented. This was carried out using Point Distribution Model (PDM) to estimate the occluded part of the facial regions and detect the face. The proposed method was evaluated using University Milano Bicocca Database (UMB). This approach gave more promising result when compared to several previous works. In conclusion, the technique detected images despite varieties of occlusions and expressions. It can further be applied on images with different poses and illumination variations

Reconnaissance de visage robuste aux occultations

Face recognition is an important technology in computer vision, which often acts as an essential component in biometrics systems, HCI systems, access control systems, multimedia indexing applications, etc. Partial occlusion, which significantly changes the appearance of part of a face, cannot only cause large performance deterioration of face recognition, but also can cause severe security issues. In this thesis, we focus on the occlusion problem in automatic face recognition in non-controlled environments. Toward this goal, we propose a framework that consists of applying explicit occlusion analysis and processing to improve face recognition under different occlusion conditions. We demonstrate in this thesis that the proposed framework is more efficient than the methods based on non-explicit occlusion treatments from the literature. We identify two new types of facial occlusions, namely the sparse occlusion and dynamic occlusion. Solutions are presented to handle the identified occlusion problems in more advanced surveillance context. Recently, the emerging Kinect sensor has been successfully applied in many computer vision fields. We introduce this new sensor in the context of face recognition, particularly in presence of occlusions, and demonstrate its efficiency compared with traditional 2D cameras. Finally, we propose two approaches based on 2D and 3D to improve the baseline face recognition techniques. Improving the baseline methods can also have the positive impact on the recognition results when partial occlusion occurs.La reconnaissance faciale est une technologie importante en vision par ordinateur, avec un rôle central en biométrie, interface homme-machine, contrôle d’accès, indexation multimédia, etc. L’occultation partielle, qui change complétement l’apparence d’une partie du visage, ne provoque pas uniquement une dégradation des performances en reconnaissance faciale, mai peut aussi avoir des conséquences en termes de sécurité. Dans cette thèse, nous concentrons sur le problème des occultations en reconnaissance faciale en environnements non contrôlés. Nous proposons une séquence qui consiste à analyser de manière explicite les occultations et à fiabiliser la reconnaissance faciale soumises à diverses occultations. Nous montrons dans cette thèse que l’approche proposée est plus efficace que les méthodes de l’état de l’art opérant sans traitement explicite dédié aux occultations. Nous identifions deux nouveaux types d’occultations, à savoir éparses et dynamiques. Des solutions sont introduites pour gérer ces problèmes d’occultation nouvellement identifiés dans un contexte de vidéo surveillance avancé. Récemment, le nouveau capteur Kinect a été utilisé avec succès dans de nombreuses applications en vision par ordinateur. Nous introduisons ce nouveau capteur dans le contexte de la reconnaissance faciale, en particulier en présence d’occultations, et démontrons son efficacité par rapport aux caméras traditionnelles. Finalement, nous proposons deux approches basées 2D et 3D permettant d’améliorer les techniques de base en reconnaissance de visages. L’amélioration des méthodes de base peut alors générer un impact positif sur les résultats de reconnaissance en présence d’occultations

Matching 3D face scans using interest points and local histogram descriptors

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State of the Art in Face Recognition

Notwithstanding the tremendous effort to solve the face recognition problem, it is not possible yet to design a face recognition system with a potential close to human performance. New computer vision and pattern recognition approaches need to be investigated. Even new knowledge and perspectives from different fields like, psychology and neuroscience must be incorporated into the current field of face recognition to design a robust face recognition system. Indeed, many more efforts are required to end up with a human like face recognition system. This book tries to make an effort to reduce the gap between the previous face recognition research state and the future state

Efficient 3D Segmentation, Registration and Mapping for Mobile Robots

Sometimes simple is better! For certain situations and tasks, simple but robust methods can achieve the same or better results in the same or less time than related sophisticated approaches. In the context of robots operating in real-world environments, key challenges are perceiving objects of interest and obstacles as well as building maps of the environment and localizing therein. The goal of this thesis is to carefully analyze such problem formulations, to deduce valid assumptions and simplifications, and to develop simple solutions that are both robust and fast. All approaches make use of sensors capturing 3D information, such as consumer RGBD cameras. Comparative evaluations show the performance of the developed approaches. For identifying objects and regions of interest in manipulation tasks, a real-time object segmentation pipeline is proposed. It exploits several common assumptions of manipulation tasks such as objects being on horizontal support surfaces (and well separated). It achieves real-time performance by using particularly efficient approximations in the individual processing steps, subsampling the input data where possible, and processing only relevant subsets of the data. The resulting pipeline segments 3D input data with up to 30Hz. In order to obtain complete segmentations of the 3D input data, a second pipeline is proposed that approximates the sampled surface, smooths the underlying data, and segments the smoothed surface into coherent regions belonging to the same geometric primitive. It uses different primitive models and can reliably segment input data into planes, cylinders and spheres. A thorough comparative evaluation shows state-of-the-art performance while computing such segmentations in near real-time. The second part of the thesis addresses the registration of 3D input data, i.e., consistently aligning input captured from different view poses. Several methods are presented for different types of input data. For the particular application of mapping with micro aerial vehicles where the 3D input data is particularly sparse, a pipeline is proposed that uses the same approximate surface reconstruction to exploit the measurement topology and a surface-to-surface registration algorithm that robustly aligns the data. Optimization of the resulting graph of determined view poses then yields globally consistent 3D maps. For sequences of RGBD data this pipeline is extended to include additional subsampling steps and an initial alignment of the data in local windows in the pose graph. In both cases, comparative evaluations show a robust and fast alignment of the input data

Rotational Subgroup Voting and Pose Clustering for Robust 3D Object Recognition

It is possible to associate a highly constrained subset of relative 6 DoF poses between two 3D shapes, as long as the local surface orientation, the normal vector, is available at every surface point. Local shape features can be used to find putative point correspondences between the models due to their ability to handle noisy and incomplete data. However, this correspondence set is usually contaminated by outliers in practical scenarios, which has led to many past contributions based on robust detectors such as the Hough transform or RANSAC. The key insight of our work is that a single correspondence between oriented points on the two models is constrained to cast votes in a 1 DoF rotational subgroup of the full group of poses, SE(3). Kernel density estimation allows combining the set of votes efficiently to determine a full 6 DoF candidate pose between the models. This modal pose with the highest density is stable under challenging conditions, such as noise, clutter, and occlusions, and provides the output estimate of our method. We first analyze the robustness of our method in relation to noise and show that it handles high outlier rates much better than RANSAC for the task of 6 DoF pose estimation. We then apply our method to four state of the art data sets for 3D object recognition that contain occluded and cluttered scenes. Our method achieves perfect recall on two LIDAR data sets and outperforms competing methods on two RGB-D data sets, thus setting a new standard for general 3D object recognition using point cloud data.Comment: Accepted for International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 201

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