1,978 research outputs found
Driven to Distraction: Self-Supervised Distractor Learning for Robust Monocular Visual Odometry in Urban Environments
We present a self-supervised approach to ignoring "distractors" in camera
images for the purposes of robustly estimating vehicle motion in cluttered
urban environments. We leverage offline multi-session mapping approaches to
automatically generate a per-pixel ephemerality mask and depth map for each
input image, which we use to train a deep convolutional network. At run-time we
use the predicted ephemerality and depth as an input to a monocular visual
odometry (VO) pipeline, using either sparse features or dense photometric
matching. Our approach yields metric-scale VO using only a single camera and
can recover the correct egomotion even when 90% of the image is obscured by
dynamic, independently moving objects. We evaluate our robust VO methods on
more than 400km of driving from the Oxford RobotCar Dataset and demonstrate
reduced odometry drift and significantly improved egomotion estimation in the
presence of large moving vehicles in urban traffic.Comment: International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2018.
Video summary: http://youtu.be/ebIrBn_nc-
3D Scanning System for Automatic High-Resolution Plant Phenotyping
Thin leaves, fine stems, self-occlusion, non-rigid and slowly changing
structures make plants difficult for three-dimensional (3D) scanning and
reconstruction -- two critical steps in automated visual phenotyping. Many
current solutions such as laser scanning, structured light, and multiview
stereo can struggle to acquire usable 3D models because of limitations in
scanning resolution and calibration accuracy. In response, we have developed a
fast, low-cost, 3D scanning platform to image plants on a rotating stage with
two tilting DSLR cameras centred on the plant. This uses new methods of camera
calibration and background removal to achieve high-accuracy 3D reconstruction.
We assessed the system's accuracy using a 3D visual hull reconstruction
algorithm applied on 2 plastic models of dicotyledonous plants, 2 sorghum
plants and 2 wheat plants across different sets of tilt angles. Scan times
ranged from 3 minutes (to capture 72 images using 2 tilt angles), to 30 minutes
(to capture 360 images using 10 tilt angles). The leaf lengths, widths, areas
and perimeters of the plastic models were measured manually and compared to
measurements from the scanning system: results were within 3-4% of each other.
The 3D reconstructions obtained with the scanning system show excellent
geometric agreement with all six plant specimens, even plants with thin leaves
and fine stems.Comment: 8 papes, DICTA 201
Learning Rank Reduced Interpolation with Principal Component Analysis
In computer vision most iterative optimization algorithms, both sparse and
dense, rely on a coarse and reliable dense initialization to bootstrap their
optimization procedure. For example, dense optical flow algorithms profit
massively in speed and robustness if they are initialized well in the basin of
convergence of the used loss function. The same holds true for methods as
sparse feature tracking when initial flow or depth information for new features
at arbitrary positions is needed. This makes it extremely important to have
techniques at hand that allow to obtain from only very few available
measurements a dense but still approximative sketch of a desired 2D structure
(e.g. depth maps, optical flow, disparity maps, etc.). The 2D map is regarded
as sample from a 2D random process. The method presented here exploits the
complete information given by the principal component analysis (PCA) of that
process, the principal basis and its prior distribution. The method is able to
determine a dense reconstruction from sparse measurement. When facing
situations with only very sparse measurements, typically the number of
principal components is further reduced which results in a loss of
expressiveness of the basis. We overcome this problem and inject prior
knowledge in a maximum a posterior (MAP) approach. We test our approach on the
KITTI and the virtual KITTI datasets and focus on the interpolation of depth
maps for driving scenes. The evaluation of the results show good agreement to
the ground truth and are clearly better than results of interpolation by the
nearest neighbor method which disregards statistical information.Comment: Accepted at Intelligent Vehicles Symposium (IV), Los Angeles, USA,
June 201
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