A multi-projector CAVE system with commodity hardware and gesture-based interaction

Spatially-immersive systems such as CAVEs provide users with surrounding worlds by projecting 3D models on multiple screens around the viewer. Compared to alternative immersive systems such as HMDs, CAVE systems are a powerful tool for collaborative inspection of virtual environments due to better use of peripheral vision, less sensitivity to tracking errors, and higher communication possibilities among users. Unfortunately, traditional CAVE setups require sophisticated equipment including stereo-ready projectors and tracking systems with high acquisition and maintenance costs. In this paper we present the design and construction of a passive-stereo, four-wall CAVE system based on commodity hardware. Our system works with any mix of a wide range of projector models that can be replaced independently at any time, and achieves high resolution and brightness at a minimum cost. The key ingredients of our CAVE are a self-calibration approach that guarantees continuity across the screen, as well as a gesture-based interaction approach based on a clever combination of skeletal data from multiple Kinect sensors.Preprin

SPLODE: Semi-Probabilistic Point and Line Odometry with Depth Estimation from RGB-D Camera Motion

Active depth cameras suffer from several limitations, which cause incomplete and noisy depth maps, and may consequently affect the performance of RGB-D Odometry. To address this issue, this paper presents a visual odometry method based on point and line features that leverages both measurements from a depth sensor and depth estimates from camera motion. Depth estimates are generated continuously by a probabilistic depth estimation framework for both types of features to compensate for the lack of depth measurements and inaccurate feature depth associations. The framework models explicitly the uncertainty of triangulating depth from both point and line observations to validate and obtain precise estimates. Furthermore, depth measurements are exploited by propagating them through a depth map registration module and using a frame-to-frame motion estimation method that considers 3D-to-2D and 2D-to-3D reprojection errors, independently. Results on RGB-D sequences captured on large indoor and outdoor scenes, where depth sensor limitations are critical, show that the combination of depth measurements and estimates through our approach is able to overcome the absence and inaccuracy of depth measurements.Comment: IROS 201

Real Time Dense Depth Estimation by Fusing Stereo with Sparse Depth Measurements

We present an approach to depth estimation that fuses information from a stereo pair with sparse range measurements derived from a LIDAR sensor or a range camera. The goal of this work is to exploit the complementary strengths of the two sensor modalities, the accurate but sparse range measurements and the ambiguous but dense stereo information. These two sources are effectively and efficiently fused by combining ideas from anisotropic diffusion and semi-global matching. We evaluate our approach on the KITTI 2015 and Middlebury 2014 datasets, using randomly sampled ground truth range measurements as our sparse depth input. We achieve significant performance improvements with a small fraction of range measurements on both datasets. We also provide qualitative results from our platform using the PMDTec Monstar sensor. Our entire pipeline runs on an NVIDIA TX-2 platform at 5Hz on 1280x1024 stereo images with 128 disparity levels.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures, 2 table