Mono3D++: Monocular 3D Vehicle Detection with Two-Scale 3D Hypotheses and Task Priors

We present a method to infer 3D pose and shape of vehicles from a single image. To tackle this ill-posed problem, we optimize two-scale projection consistency between the generated 3D hypotheses and their 2D pseudo-measurements. Specifically, we use a morphable wireframe model to generate a fine-scaled representation of vehicle shape and pose. To reduce its sensitivity to 2D landmarks, we jointly model the 3D bounding box as a coarse representation which improves robustness. We also integrate three task priors, including unsupervised monocular depth, a ground plane constraint as well as vehicle shape priors, with forward projection errors into an overall energy function.Comment: Proc. of the AAAI, September 201

3D Shape Estimation from 2D Landmarks: A Convex Relaxation Approach

We investigate the problem of estimating the 3D shape of an object, given a set of 2D landmarks in a single image. To alleviate the reconstruction ambiguity, a widely-used approach is to confine the unknown 3D shape within a shape space built upon existing shapes. While this approach has proven to be successful in various applications, a challenging issue remains, i.e., the joint estimation of shape parameters and camera-pose parameters requires to solve a nonconvex optimization problem. The existing methods often adopt an alternating minimization scheme to locally update the parameters, and consequently the solution is sensitive to initialization. In this paper, we propose a convex formulation to address this problem and develop an efficient algorithm to solve the proposed convex program. We demonstrate the exact recovery property of the proposed method, its merits compared to alternative methods, and the applicability in human pose and car shape estimation.Comment: In Proceedings of CVPR 201

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

LiveCap: Real-time Human Performance Capture from Monocular Video

We present the first real-time human performance capture approach that reconstructs dense, space-time coherent deforming geometry of entire humans in general everyday clothing from just a single RGB video. We propose a novel two-stage analysis-by-synthesis optimization whose formulation and implementation are designed for high performance. In the first stage, a skinned template model is jointly fitted to background subtracted input video, 2D and 3D skeleton joint positions found using a deep neural network, and a set of sparse facial landmark detections. In the second stage, dense non-rigid 3D deformations of skin and even loose apparel are captured based on a novel real-time capable algorithm for non-rigid tracking using dense photometric and silhouette constraints. Our novel energy formulation leverages automatically identified material regions on the template to model the differing non-rigid deformation behavior of skin and apparel. The two resulting non-linear optimization problems per-frame are solved with specially-tailored data-parallel Gauss-Newton solvers. In order to achieve real-time performance of over 25Hz, we design a pipelined parallel architecture using the CPU and two commodity GPUs. Our method is the first real-time monocular approach for full-body performance capture. Our method yields comparable accuracy with off-line performance capture techniques, while being orders of magnitude faster