3,738 research outputs found
PROBE-GK: Predictive Robust Estimation using Generalized Kernels
Many algorithms in computer vision and robotics make strong assumptions about
uncertainty, and rely on the validity of these assumptions to produce accurate
and consistent state estimates. In practice, dynamic environments may degrade
sensor performance in predictable ways that cannot be captured with static
uncertainty parameters. In this paper, we employ fast nonparametric Bayesian
inference techniques to more accurately model sensor uncertainty. By setting a
prior on observation uncertainty, we derive a predictive robust estimator, and
show how our model can be learned from sample images, both with and without
knowledge of the motion used to generate the data. We validate our approach
through Monte Carlo simulations, and report significant improvements in
localization accuracy relative to a fixed noise model in several settings,
including on synthetic data, the KITTI dataset, and our own experimental
platform.Comment: In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and
Automation (ICRA'16), Stockholm, Sweden, May 16-21, 201
Accuracy assessment of Digital Surface Models generated by Semiglobal matching algorithm using Lidar data
To measure the accuracy of Digital Surface Models (DSMs) generated by high resolution satellite images (HRSI) using semi-global matching algorithm in comparison with LIDAR DSMs, two different test areas with different properties and corresponding attributes and magnitudes of errors are considered. Error characteristics are classified as systematic and gross errors and significance of them to measure the accuracy of DSMs are evaluated. In this manner and to avoid the influence of outliers in accuracy assessment robust statistical methods are proposed. According to final values obtained for two test areas it can be concluded that the performance of DSMs generated by stereo matching for mountainous wooden areas in respect to the accuracy of LIDAR DSM are poor. In contrast, in case of residential urban areas the quality of the DSM generated by HRSI is able to follow the accuracy of LIDAR data
J-MOD: Joint Monocular Obstacle Detection and Depth Estimation
In this work, we propose an end-to-end deep architecture that jointly learns
to detect obstacles and estimate their depth for MAV flight applications. Most
of the existing approaches either rely on Visual SLAM systems or on depth
estimation models to build 3D maps and detect obstacles. However, for the task
of avoiding obstacles this level of complexity is not required. Recent works
have proposed multi task architectures to both perform scene understanding and
depth estimation. We follow their track and propose a specific architecture to
jointly estimate depth and obstacles, without the need to compute a global map,
but maintaining compatibility with a global SLAM system if needed. The network
architecture is devised to exploit the joint information of the obstacle
detection task, that produces more reliable bounding boxes, with the depth
estimation one, increasing the robustness of both to scenario changes. We call
this architecture J-MOD. We test the effectiveness of our approach with
experiments on sequences with different appearance and focal lengths and
compare it to SotA multi task methods that jointly perform semantic
segmentation and depth estimation. In addition, we show the integration in a
full system using a set of simulated navigation experiments where a MAV
explores an unknown scenario and plans safe trajectories by using our detection
model
DepthCut: Improved Depth Edge Estimation Using Multiple Unreliable Channels
In the context of scene understanding, a variety of methods exists to
estimate different information channels from mono or stereo images, including
disparity, depth, and normals. Although several advances have been reported in
the recent years for these tasks, the estimated information is often imprecise
particularly near depth discontinuities or creases. Studies have however shown
that precisely such depth edges carry critical cues for the perception of
shape, and play important roles in tasks like depth-based segmentation or
foreground selection. Unfortunately, the currently extracted channels often
carry conflicting signals, making it difficult for subsequent applications to
effectively use them. In this paper, we focus on the problem of obtaining
high-precision depth edges (i.e., depth contours and creases) by jointly
analyzing such unreliable information channels. We propose DepthCut, a
data-driven fusion of the channels using a convolutional neural network trained
on a large dataset with known depth. The resulting depth edges can be used for
segmentation, decomposing a scene into depth layers with relatively flat depth,
or improving the accuracy of the depth estimate near depth edges by
constraining its gradients to agree with these edges. Quantitatively, we
compare against 15 variants of baselines and demonstrate that our depth edges
result in an improved segmentation performance and an improved depth estimate
near depth edges compared to data-agnostic channel fusion. Qualitatively, we
demonstrate that the depth edges result in superior segmentation and depth
orderings.Comment: 12 page
PWC-Net: CNNs for Optical Flow Using Pyramid, Warping, and Cost Volume
We present a compact but effective CNN model for optical flow, called
PWC-Net. PWC-Net has been designed according to simple and well-established
principles: pyramidal processing, warping, and the use of a cost volume. Cast
in a learnable feature pyramid, PWC-Net uses the cur- rent optical flow
estimate to warp the CNN features of the second image. It then uses the warped
features and features of the first image to construct a cost volume, which is
processed by a CNN to estimate the optical flow. PWC-Net is 17 times smaller in
size and easier to train than the recent FlowNet2 model. Moreover, it
outperforms all published optical flow methods on the MPI Sintel final pass and
KITTI 2015 benchmarks, running at about 35 fps on Sintel resolution (1024x436)
images. Our models are available on https://github.com/NVlabs/PWC-Net.Comment: CVPR 2018 camera ready version (with github link to Caffe and PyTorch
code
How to Train a CAT: Learning Canonical Appearance Transformations for Direct Visual Localization Under Illumination Change
Direct visual localization has recently enjoyed a resurgence in popularity
with the increasing availability of cheap mobile computing power. The
competitive accuracy and robustness of these algorithms compared to
state-of-the-art feature-based methods, as well as their natural ability to
yield dense maps, makes them an appealing choice for a variety of mobile
robotics applications. However, direct methods remain brittle in the face of
appearance change due to their underlying assumption of photometric
consistency, which is commonly violated in practice. In this paper, we propose
to mitigate this problem by training deep convolutional encoder-decoder models
to transform images of a scene such that they correspond to a previously-seen
canonical appearance. We validate our method in multiple environments and
illumination conditions using high-fidelity synthetic RGB-D datasets, and
integrate the trained models into a direct visual localization pipeline,
yielding improvements in visual odometry (VO) accuracy through time-varying
illumination conditions, as well as improved metric relocalization performance
under illumination change, where conventional methods normally fail. We further
provide a preliminary investigation of transfer learning from synthetic to real
environments in a localization context. An open-source implementation of our
method using PyTorch is available at https://github.com/utiasSTARS/cat-net.Comment: In IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L) and presented at the
IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA'18), Brisbane,
Australia, May 21-25, 201
- …