Face tracking using a hyperbolic catadioptric omnidirectional system

In the first part of this paper, we present a brief review on catadioptric omnidirectional systems. The special case of the hyperbolic omnidirectional system is analysed in depth. The literature shows that a hyperboloidal mirror has two clear advantages over alternative geometries. Firstly, a hyperboloidal mirror has a single projection centre [1]. Secondly, the image resolution is uniformly distributed along the mirror’s radius [2]. In the second part of this paper we show empirical results for the detection and tracking of faces from the omnidirectional images using Viola-Jones method. Both panoramic and perspective projections, extracted from the omnidirectional image, were used for that purpose. The omnidirectional image size was 480x480 pixels, in greyscale. The tracking method used regions of interest (ROIs) set as the result of the detections of faces from a panoramic projection of the image. In order to avoid losing or duplicating detections, the panoramic projection was extended horizontally. Duplications were eliminated based on the ROIs established by previous detections. After a confirmed detection, faces were tracked from perspective projections (which are called virtual cameras), each one associated with a particular face. The zoom, pan and tilt of each virtual camera was determined by the ROIs previously computed on the panoramic image. The results show that, when using a careful combination of the two projections, good frame rates can be achieved in the task of tracking faces reliably

A minimalistic approach to appearance-based visual SLAM

This paper presents a vision-based approach to SLAM in indoor / outdoor environments with minimalistic sensing and computational requirements. The approach is based on a graph representation of robot poses, using a relaxation algorithm to obtain a globally consistent map. Each link corresponds to a relative measurement of the spatial relation between the two nodes it connects. The links describe the likelihood distribution of the relative pose as a Gaussian distribution. To estimate the covariance matrix for links obtained from an omni-directional vision sensor, a novel method is introduced based on the relative similarity of neighbouring images. This new method does not require determining distances to image features using multiple view geometry, for example. Combined indoor and outdoor experiments demonstrate that the approach can handle qualitatively different environments (without modification of the parameters), that it can cope with violations of the “flat floor assumption” to some degree, and that it scales well with increasing size of the environment, producing topologically correct and geometrically accurate maps at low computational cost. Further experiments demonstrate that the approach is also suitable for combining multiple overlapping maps, e.g. for solving the multi-robot SLAM problem with unknown initial poses

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

Odometria visual monocular em robôs para a agricultura com camara(s) com lentes "olho de peixe"

One of the main challenges in robotics is to develop accurate localization methods that achieve acceptable runtime performances.One of the most common approaches is to use Global Navigation Satellite System such as GPS to localize robots.However, satellite signals are not full-time available in some kind of environments.The purpose of this dissertation is to develop a localization system for a ground robot.This robot is inserted in a project called RoMoVi and is intended to perform tasks like crop monitoring and harvesting in steep slope vineyards.This vineyards are localized in the Douro region which are characterized by the presence of high hills.Thus, the context of RoMoVi is not prosperous for the use of GPS-based localization systems.Therefore, the main goal of this work is to create a reliable localization system based on vision techniques and low cost sensors.To do so, a Visual Odometry system will be used.The concept of Visual Odometry is equivalent to wheel odometry but it has the advantage of not suffering from wheel slip which is present in these kind of environments due to the harsh terrain conditions.Here, motion is tracked computing the homogeneous transformation between camera frames, incrementally.However, this approach also presents some open issues.Most of the state of art methods, specially those who present a monocular camera system, don't perform good motion estimations in pure rotations.In some of them, motion even degenerates in these situations.Also, computing the motion scale is a difficult task that is widely investigated in this field.This work is intended to solve these issues.To do so, fisheye lens cameras will be used in order to achieve wide vision field of views

Supervised Autonomous Locomotion and Manipulation for Disaster Response with a Centaur-like Robot

Mobile manipulation tasks are one of the key challenges in the field of search and rescue (SAR) robotics requiring robots with flexible locomotion and manipulation abilities. Since the tasks are mostly unknown in advance, the robot has to adapt to a wide variety of terrains and workspaces during a mission. The centaur-like robot Centauro has a hybrid legged-wheeled base and an anthropomorphic upper body to carry out complex tasks in environments too dangerous for humans. Due to its high number of degrees of freedom, controlling the robot with direct teleoperation approaches is challenging and exhausting. Supervised autonomy approaches are promising to increase quality and speed of control while keeping the flexibility to solve unknown tasks. We developed a set of operator assistance functionalities with different levels of autonomy to control the robot for challenging locomotion and manipulation tasks. The integrated system was evaluated in disaster response scenarios and showed promising performance.Comment: In Proceedings of IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), Madrid, Spain, October 201

Structureless Camera Motion Estimation of Unordered Omnidirectional Images

This work aims at providing a novel camera motion estimation pipeline from large collections of unordered omnidirectional images. In oder to keep the pipeline as general and flexible as possible, cameras are modelled as unit spheres, allowing to incorporate any central camera type. For each camera an unprojection lookup is generated from intrinsics, which is called P2S-map (Pixel-to-Sphere-map), mapping pixels to their corresponding positions on the unit sphere. Consequently the camera geometry becomes independent of the underlying projection model. The pipeline also generates P2S-maps from world map projections with less distortion effects as they are known from cartography. Using P2S-maps from camera calibration and world map projection allows to convert omnidirectional camera images to an appropriate world map projection in oder to apply standard feature extraction and matching algorithms for data association. The proposed estimation pipeline combines the flexibility of SfM (Structure from Motion) - which handles unordered image collections - with the efficiency of PGO (Pose Graph Optimization), which is used as back-end in graph-based Visual SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) approaches to optimize camera poses from large image sequences. SfM uses BA (Bundle Adjustment) to jointly optimize camera poses (motion) and 3d feature locations (structure), which becomes computationally expensive for large-scale scenarios. On the contrary PGO solves for camera poses (motion) from measured transformations between cameras, maintaining optimization managable. The proposed estimation algorithm combines both worlds. It obtains up-to-scale transformations between image pairs using two-view constraints, which are jointly scaled using trifocal constraints. A pose graph is generated from scaled two-view transformations and solved by PGO to obtain camera motion efficiently even for large image collections. Obtained results can be used as input data to provide initial pose estimates for further 3d reconstruction purposes e.g. to build a sparse structure from feature correspondences in an SfM or SLAM framework with further refinement via BA. The pipeline also incorporates fixed extrinsic constraints from multi-camera setups as well as depth information provided by RGBD sensors. The entire camera motion estimation pipeline does not need to generate a sparse 3d structure of the captured environment and thus is called SCME (Structureless Camera Motion Estimation).:1 Introduction 1.1 Motivation 1.1.1 Increasing Interest of Image-Based 3D Reconstruction 1.1.2 Underground Environments as Challenging Scenario 1.1.3 Improved Mobile Camera Systems for Full Omnidirectional Imaging 1.2 Issues 1.2.1 Directional versus Omnidirectional Image Acquisition 1.2.2 Structure from Motion versus Visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping 1.3 Contribution 1.4 Structure of this Work 2 Related Work 2.1 Visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping 2.1.1 Visual Odometry 2.1.2 Pose Graph Optimization 2.2 Structure from Motion 2.2.1 Bundle Adjustment 2.2.2 Structureless Bundle Adjustment 2.3 Corresponding Issues 2.4 Proposed Reconstruction Pipeline 3 Cameras and Pixel-to-Sphere Mappings with P2S-Maps 3.1 Types 3.2 Models 3.2.1 Unified Camera Model 3.2.2 Polynomal Camera Model 3.2.3 Spherical Camera Model 3.3 P2S-Maps - Mapping onto Unit Sphere via Lookup Table 3.3.1 Lookup Table as Color Image 3.3.2 Lookup Interpolation 3.3.3 Depth Data Conversion 4 Calibration 4.1 Overview of Proposed Calibration Pipeline 4.2 Target Detection 4.3 Intrinsic Calibration 4.3.1 Selected Examples 4.4 Extrinsic Calibration 4.4.1 3D-2D Pose Estimation 4.4.2 2D-2D Pose Estimation 4.4.3 Pose Optimization 4.4.4 Uncertainty Estimation 4.4.5 PoseGraph Representation 4.4.6 Bundle Adjustment 4.4.7 Selected Examples 5 Full Omnidirectional Image Projections 5.1 Panoramic Image Stitching 5.2 World Map Projections 5.3 World Map Projection Generator for P2S-Maps 5.4 Conversion between Projections based on P2S-Maps 5.4.1 Proposed Workflow 5.4.2 Data Storage Format 5.4.3 Real World Example 6 Relations between Two Camera Spheres 6.1 Forward and Backward Projection 6.2 Triangulation 6.2.1 Linear Least Squares Method 6.2.2 Alternative Midpoint Method 6.3 Epipolar Geometry 6.4 Transformation Recovery from Essential Matrix 6.4.1 Cheirality 6.4.2 Standard Procedure 6.4.3 Simplified Procedure 6.4.4 Improved Procedure 6.5 Two-View Estimation 6.5.1 Evaluation Strategy 6.5.2 Error Metric 6.5.3 Evaluation of Estimation Algorithms 6.5.4 Concluding Remarks 6.6 Two-View Optimization 6.6.1 Epipolar-Based Error Distances 6.6.2 Projection-Based Error Distances 6.6.3 Comparison between Error Distances 6.7 Two-View Translation Scaling 6.7.1 Linear Least Squares Estimation 6.7.2 Non-Linear Least Squares Optimization 6.7.3 Comparison between Initial and Optimized Scaling Factor 6.8 Homography to Identify Degeneracies 6.8.1 Homography for Spherical Cameras 6.8.2 Homography Estimation 6.8.3 Homography Optimization 6.8.4 Homography and Pure Rotation 6.8.5 Homography in Epipolar Geometry 7 Relations between Three Camera Spheres 7.1 Three View Geometry 7.2 Crossing Epipolar Planes Geometry 7.3 Trifocal Geometry 7.4 Relation between Trifocal, Three-View and Crossing Epipolar Planes 7.5 Translation Ratio between Up-To-Scale Two-View Transformations 7.5.1 Structureless Determination Approaches 7.5.2 Structure-Based Determination Approaches 7.5.3 Comparison between Proposed Approaches 8 Pose Graphs 8.1 Optimization Principle 8.2 Solvers 8.2.1 Additional Graph Solvers 8.2.2 False Loop Closure Detection 8.3 Pose Graph Generation 8.3.1 Generation of Synthetic Pose Graph Data 8.3.2 Optimization of Synthetic Pose Graph Data 9 Structureless Camera Motion Estimation 9.1 SCME Pipeline 9.2 Determination of Two-View Translation Scale Factors 9.3 Integration of Depth Data 9.4 Integration of Extrinsic Camera Constraints 10 Camera Motion Estimation Results 10.1 Directional Camera Images 10.2 Omnidirectional Camera Images 11 Conclusion 11.1 Summary 11.2 Outlook and Future Work Appendices A.1 Additional Extrinsic Calibration Results A.2 Linear Least Squares Scaling A.3 Proof Rank Deficiency A.4 Alternative Derivation Midpoint Method A.5 Simplification of Depth Calculation A.6 Relation between Epipolar and Circumferential Constraint A.7 Covariance Estimation A.8 Uncertainty Estimation from Epipolar Geometry A.9 Two-View Scaling Factor Estimation: Uncertainty Estimation A.10 Two-View Scaling Factor Optimization: Uncertainty Estimation A.11 Depth from Adjoining Two-View Geometries A.12 Alternative Three-View Derivation A.12.1 Second Derivation Approach A.12.2 Third Derivation Approach A.13 Relation between Trifocal Geometry and Alternative Midpoint Method A.14 Additional Pose Graph Generation Examples A.15 Pose Graph Solver Settings A.16 Additional Pose Graph Optimization Examples Bibliograph

D2D^2SLAM: Decentralized and Distributed Collaborative Visual-inertial SLAM System for Aerial Swarm

In recent years, aerial swarm technology has developed rapidly. In order to accomplish a fully autonomous aerial swarm, a key technology is decentralized and distributed collaborative SLAM (CSLAM) for aerial swarms, which estimates the relative pose and the consistent global trajectories. In this paper, we propose $D^2$SLAM: a decentralized and distributed ($D^2$) collaborative SLAM algorithm. This algorithm has high local accuracy and global consistency, and the distributed architecture allows it to scale up. $D^2$SLAM covers swarm state estimation in two scenarios: near-field state estimation for high real-time accuracy at close range and far-field state estimation for globally consistent trajectories estimation at the long-range between UAVs. Distributed optimization algorithms are adopted as the backend to achieve the $D^2$ goal. $D^2$SLAM is robust to transient loss of communication, network delays, and other factors. Thanks to the flexible architecture, $D^2$SLAM has the potential of applying in various scenarios

Visual Odometry and Sparse Scene Reconstruction for UAVs with a Multi-Fisheye Camera System

Autonomously operating UAVs demand a fast localization for navigation, to actively explore unknown areas and to create maps. For pose estimation, many UAV systems make use of a combination of GPS receivers and inertial sensor units (IMU). However, GPS signal coverage may go down occasionally, especially in the close vicinity of objects, and precise IMUs are too heavy to be carried by lightweight UAVs. This and the high cost of high quality IMU motivate the use of inexpensive vision based sensors for localization using visual odometry or visual SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping) techniques. The first contribution of this thesis is a more general approach to bundle adjustment with an extended version of the projective coplanarity equation which enables us to make use of omnidirectional multi-camera systems which may consist of fisheye cameras that can capture a large field of view with one shot. We use ray directions as observations instead of image points which is why our approach does not rely on a specific projection model assuming a central projection. In addition, our approach allows the integration and estimation of points at infinity, which classical bundle adjustments are not capable of. We show that the integration of far or infinitely far points stabilizes the estimation of the rotation angles of the camera poses. In its second contribution, we employ this approach to bundle adjustment in a highly integrated system for incremental pose estimation and mapping on light-weight UAVs. Based on the image sequences of a multi-camera system our system makes use of tracked feature points to incrementally build a sparse map and incrementally refines this map using the iSAM2 algorithm. Our system is able to optionally integrate GPS information on the level of carrier phase observations even in underconstrained situations, e.g. if only two satellites are visible, for georeferenced pose estimation. This way, we are able to use all available information in underconstrained GPS situations to keep the mapped 3D model accurate and georeferenced. In its third contribution, we present an approach for re-using existing methods for dense stereo matching with fisheye cameras, which has the advantage that highly optimized existing methods can be applied as a black-box without modifications even with cameras that have field of view of more than 180 deg. We provide a detailed accuracy analysis of the obtained dense stereo results. The accuracy analysis shows the growing uncertainty of observed image points of fisheye cameras due to increasing blur towards the image border. Core of the contribution is a rigorous variance component estimation which allows to estimate the variance of the observed disparities at an image point as a function of the distance of that point to the principal point. We show that this improved stochastic model provides a more realistic prediction of the uncertainty of the triangulated 3D points.Autonom operierende UAVs benötigen eine schnelle Lokalisierung zur Navigation, zur Exploration unbekannter Umgebungen und zur Kartierung. Zur Posenbestimmung verwenden viele UAV-Systeme eine Kombination aus GPS-Empfängern und Inertial-Messeinheiten (IMU). Die Verfügbarkeit von GPS-Signalen ist jedoch nicht überall gewährleistet, insbesondere in der Nähe abschattender Objekte, und präzise IMUs sind für leichtgewichtige UAVs zu schwer. Auch die hohen Kosten qualitativ hochwertiger IMUs motivieren den Einsatz von kostengünstigen bildgebenden Sensoren zur Lokalisierung mittels visueller Odometrie oder SLAM-Techniken zur simultanen Lokalisierung und Kartierung. Im ersten wissenschaftlichen Beitrag dieser Arbeit entwickeln wir einen allgemeineren Ansatz für die Bündelausgleichung mit einem erweiterten Modell für die projektive Kollinearitätsgleichung, sodass auch omnidirektionale Multikamerasysteme verwendet werden können, welche beispielsweise bestehend aus Fisheyekameras mit einer Aufnahme einen großen Sichtbereich abdecken. Durch die Integration von Strahlrichtungen als Beobachtungen ist unser Ansatz nicht von einem kameraspezifischen Abbildungsmodell abhängig solange dieses der Zentralprojektion folgt. Zudem erlaubt unser Ansatz die Integration und Schätzung von unendlich fernen Punkten, was bei klassischen Bündelausgleichungen nicht möglich ist. Wir zeigen, dass durch die Integration weit entfernter und unendlich ferner Punkte die Schätzung der Rotationswinkel der Kameraposen stabilisiert werden kann. Im zweiten Beitrag verwenden wir diesen entwickelten Ansatz zur Bündelausgleichung für ein System zur inkrementellen Posenschätzung und dünnbesetzten Kartierung auf einem leichtgewichtigen UAV. Basierend auf den Bildsequenzen eines Mulitkamerasystems baut unser System mittels verfolgter markanter Bildpunkte inkrementell eine dünnbesetzte Karte auf und verfeinert diese inkrementell mittels des iSAM2-Algorithmus. Unser System ist in der Lage optional auch GPS Informationen auf dem Level von GPS-Trägerphasen zu integrieren, wodurch sogar in unterbestimmten Situation - beispielsweise bei nur zwei verfügbaren Satelliten - diese Informationen zur georeferenzierten Posenschätzung verwendet werden können. Im dritten Beitrag stellen wir einen Ansatz zur Verwendung existierender Methoden für dichtes Stereomatching mit Fisheyekameras vor, sodass hoch optimierte existierende Methoden als Black Box ohne Modifzierungen sogar mit Kameras mit einem Gesichtsfeld von mehr als 180 Grad verwendet werden können. Wir stellen eine detaillierte Genauigkeitsanalyse basierend auf dem Ergebnis des dichten Stereomatchings dar. Die Genauigkeitsanalyse zeigt, wie stark die Genauigkeit beobachteter Bildpunkte bei Fisheyekameras zum Bildrand aufgrund von zunehmender Unschärfe abnimmt. Das Kernstück dieses Beitrags ist eine Varianzkomponentenschätzung, welche die Schätzung der Varianz der beobachteten Disparitäten an einem Bildpunkt als Funktion von der Distanz dieses Punktes zum Hauptpunkt des Bildes ermöglicht. Wir zeigen, dass dieses verbesserte stochastische Modell eine realistischere Prädiktion der Genauigkeiten der 3D Punkte ermöglicht