7,823 research outputs found
Optical techniques for 3D surface reconstruction in computer-assisted laparoscopic surgery
One of the main challenges for computer-assisted surgery (CAS) is to determine the intra-opera- tive morphology and motion of soft-tissues. This information is prerequisite to the registration of multi-modal patient-specific data for enhancing the surgeon’s navigation capabilites by observ- ing beyond exposed tissue surfaces and for providing intelligent control of robotic-assisted in- struments. In minimally invasive surgery (MIS), optical techniques are an increasingly attractive approach for in vivo 3D reconstruction of the soft-tissue surface geometry. This paper reviews the state-of-the-art methods for optical intra-operative 3D reconstruction in laparoscopic surgery and discusses the technical challenges and future perspectives towards clinical translation. With the recent paradigm shift of surgical practice towards MIS and new developments in 3D opti- cal imaging, this is a timely discussion about technologies that could facilitate complex CAS procedures in dynamic and deformable anatomical regions
Stereo and ToF Data Fusion by Learning from Synthetic Data
Time-of-Flight (ToF) sensors and stereo vision systems are both capable of acquiring depth information but they have complementary characteristics and issues. A more accurate representation of the scene geometry can be obtained by fusing the two depth sources. In this paper we present a novel framework for data fusion where the contribution of the two depth sources is controlled by confidence measures that are jointly estimated using a Convolutional Neural Network. The two depth sources are fused enforcing the local consistency of depth data, taking into account the estimated confidence information. The deep network is trained using a synthetic dataset and we show how the classifier is able to generalize to different data, obtaining reliable estimations not only on synthetic data but also on real world scenes. Experimental results show that the proposed approach increases the accuracy of the depth estimation on both synthetic and real data and that it is able to outperform state-of-the-art methods
Reliable fusion of ToF and stereo depth driven by confidence measures
In this paper we propose a framework for the fusion of depth data produced by a Time-of-Flight (ToF) camera and stereo vision system. Initially, depth data acquired by the ToF camera are upsampled by an ad-hoc algorithm based on image segmentation and bilateral filtering. In parallel a dense disparity map is obtained using the Semi- Global Matching stereo algorithm. Reliable confidence measures are extracted for both the ToF and stereo depth data. In particular, ToF confidence also accounts for the mixed-pixel effect and the stereo confidence accounts for the relationship between the pointwise matching costs and the cost obtained by the semi-global optimization. Finally, the two depth maps are synergically fused by enforcing the local consistency of depth data accounting for the confidence of the two data sources at each location. Experimental results clearly show that the proposed method produces accurate high resolution depth maps and outperforms the compared fusion algorithms
Robust Intrinsic and Extrinsic Calibration of RGB-D Cameras
Color-depth cameras (RGB-D cameras) have become the primary sensors in most
robotics systems, from service robotics to industrial robotics applications.
Typical consumer-grade RGB-D cameras are provided with a coarse intrinsic and
extrinsic calibration that generally does not meet the accuracy requirements
needed by many robotics applications (e.g., highly accurate 3D environment
reconstruction and mapping, high precision object recognition and localization,
...). In this paper, we propose a human-friendly, reliable and accurate
calibration framework that enables to easily estimate both the intrinsic and
extrinsic parameters of a general color-depth sensor couple. Our approach is
based on a novel two components error model. This model unifies the error
sources of RGB-D pairs based on different technologies, such as
structured-light 3D cameras and time-of-flight cameras. Our method provides
some important advantages compared to other state-of-the-art systems: it is
general (i.e., well suited for different types of sensors), based on an easy
and stable calibration protocol, provides a greater calibration accuracy, and
has been implemented within the ROS robotics framework. We report detailed
experimental validations and performance comparisons to support our statements
C-blox: A Scalable and Consistent TSDF-based Dense Mapping Approach
In many applications, maintaining a consistent dense map of the environment
is key to enabling robotic platforms to perform higher level decision making.
Several works have addressed the challenge of creating precise dense 3D maps
from visual sensors providing depth information. However, during operation over
longer missions, reconstructions can easily become inconsistent due to
accumulated camera tracking error and delayed loop closure. Without explicitly
addressing the problem of map consistency, recovery from such distortions tends
to be difficult. We present a novel system for dense 3D mapping which addresses
the challenge of building consistent maps while dealing with scalability.
Central to our approach is the representation of the environment as a
collection of overlapping TSDF subvolumes. These subvolumes are localized
through feature-based camera tracking and bundle adjustment. Our main
contribution is a pipeline for identifying stable regions in the map, and to
fuse the contributing subvolumes. This approach allows us to reduce map growth
while still maintaining consistency. We demonstrate the proposed system on a
publicly available dataset and simulation engine, and demonstrate the efficacy
of the proposed approach for building consistent and scalable maps. Finally we
demonstrate our approach running in real-time on-board a lightweight MAV.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures, conferenc
Real-time on-board obstacle avoidance for UAVs based on embedded stereo vision
In order to improve usability and safety, modern unmanned aerial vehicles
(UAVs) are equipped with sensors to monitor the environment, such as
laser-scanners and cameras. One important aspect in this monitoring process is
to detect obstacles in the flight path in order to avoid collisions. Since a
large number of consumer UAVs suffer from tight weight and power constraints,
our work focuses on obstacle avoidance based on a lightweight stereo camera
setup. We use disparity maps, which are computed from the camera images, to
locate obstacles and to automatically steer the UAV around them. For disparity
map computation we optimize the well-known semi-global matching (SGM) approach
for the deployment on an embedded FPGA. The disparity maps are then converted
into simpler representations, the so called U-/V-Maps, which are used for
obstacle detection. Obstacle avoidance is based on a reactive approach which
finds the shortest path around the obstacles as soon as they have a critical
distance to the UAV. One of the fundamental goals of our work was the reduction
of development costs by closing the gap between application development and
hardware optimization. Hence, we aimed at using high-level synthesis (HLS) for
porting our algorithms, which are written in C/C++, to the embedded FPGA. We
evaluated our implementation of the disparity estimation on the KITTI Stereo
2015 benchmark. The integrity of the overall realtime reactive obstacle
avoidance algorithm has been evaluated by using Hardware-in-the-Loop testing in
conjunction with two flight simulators.Comment: Accepted in the International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote
Sensing and Spatial Information Scienc
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
- …