Towards 3D Matching of Point Clouds Derived from Oblique and Nadir Airborne Imagery

Because of the low-expense high-efficient image collection process and the rich 3D and texture information presented in the images, a combined use of 2D airborne nadir and oblique images to reconstruct 3D geometric scene has a promising market for future commercial usage like urban planning or first responders. The methodology introduced in this thesis provides a feasible way towards fully automated 3D city modeling from oblique and nadir airborne imagery. In this thesis, the difficulty of matching 2D images with large disparity is avoided by grouping the images first and applying the 3D registration afterward. The procedure starts with the extraction of point clouds using a modified version of the RIT 3D Extraction Workflow. Then the point clouds are refined by noise removal and surface smoothing processes. Since the point clouds extracted from different image groups use independent coordinate systems, there are translation, rotation and scale differences existing. To figure out these differences, 3D keypoints and their features are extracted. For each pair of point clouds, an initial alignment and a more accurate registration are applied in succession. The final transform matrix presents the parameters describing the translation, rotation and scale requirements. The methodology presented in the thesis has been shown to behave well for test data. The robustness of this method is discussed by adding artificial noise to the test data. For Pictometry oblique aerial imagery, the initial alignment provides a rough alignment result, which contains a larger offset compared to that of test data because of the low quality of the point clouds themselves, but it can be further refined through the final optimization. The accuracy of the final registration result is evaluated by comparing it to the result obtained from manual selection of matched points. Using the method introduced, point clouds extracted from different image groups could be combined with each other to build a more complete point cloud, or be used as a complement to existing point clouds extracted from other sources. This research will both improve the state of the art of 3D city modeling and inspire new ideas in related fields

Robust Localization in 3D Prior Maps for Autonomous Driving.

In order to navigate autonomously, many self-driving vehicles require precise localization within an a priori known map that is annotated with exact lane locations, traffic signs, and additional metadata that govern the rules of the road. This approach transforms the extremely difficult and unpredictable task of online perception into a more structured localization problem—where exact localization in these maps provides the autonomous agent a wealth of knowledge for safe navigation. This thesis presents several novel localization algorithms that leverage a high-fidelity three-dimensional (3D) prior map that together provide a robust and reliable framework for vehicle localization. First, we present a generic probabilistic method for localizing an autonomous vehicle equipped with a 3D light detection and ranging (LIDAR) scanner. This proposed algorithm models the world as a mixture of several Gaussians, characterizing the z-height and reflectivity distribution of the environment—which we rasterize to facilitate fast and exact multiresolution inference. Second, we propose a visual localization strategy that replaces the expensive 3D LIDAR scanners with significantly cheaper, commodity cameras. In doing so, we exploit a graphics processing unit to generate synthetic views of our belief environment, resulting in a localization solution that achieves a similar order of magnitude error rate with a sensor that is several orders of magnitude cheaper. Finally, we propose a visual obstacle detection algorithm that leverages knowledge of our high-fidelity prior maps in its obstacle prediction model. This not only provides obstacle awareness at high rates for vehicle navigation, but also improves our visual localization quality as we are cognizant of static and non-static regions of the environment. All of these proposed algorithms are demonstrated to be real-time solutions for our self-driving car.PhDComputer Science and EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/133410/1/rwolcott_1.pd

Robust and Optimal Methods for Geometric Sensor Data Alignment

Geometric sensor data alignment - the problem of finding the rigid transformation that correctly aligns two sets of sensor data without prior knowledge of how the data correspond - is a fundamental task in computer vision and robotics. It is inconvenient then that outliers and non-convexity are inherent to the problem and present significant challenges for alignment algorithms. Outliers are highly prevalent in sets of sensor data, particularly when the sets overlap incompletely. Despite this, many alignment objective functions are not robust to outliers, leading to erroneous alignments. In addition, alignment problems are highly non-convex, a property arising from the objective function and the transformation. While finding a local optimum may not be difficult, finding the global optimum is a hard optimisation problem. These key challenges have not been fully and jointly resolved in the existing literature, and so there is a need for robust and optimal solutions to alignment problems. Hence the objective of this thesis is to develop tractable algorithms for geometric sensor data alignment that are robust to outliers and not susceptible to spurious local optima. This thesis makes several significant contributions to the geometric alignment literature, founded on new insights into robust alignment and the geometry of transformations. Firstly, a novel discriminative sensor data representation is proposed that has better viewpoint invariance than generative models and is time and memory efficient without sacrificing model fidelity. Secondly, a novel local optimisation algorithm is developed for nD-nD geometric alignment under a robust distance measure. It manifests a wider region of convergence and a greater robustness to outliers and sampling artefacts than other local optimisation algorithms. Thirdly, the first optimal solution for 3D-3D geometric alignment with an inherently robust objective function is proposed. It outperforms other geometric alignment algorithms on challenging datasets due to its guaranteed optimality and outlier robustness, and has an efficient parallel implementation. Fourthly, the first optimal solution for 2D-3D geometric alignment with an inherently robust objective function is proposed. It outperforms existing approaches on challenging datasets, reliably finding the global optimum, and has an efficient parallel implementation. Finally, another optimal solution is developed for 2D-3D geometric alignment, using a robust surface alignment measure. Ultimately, robust and optimal methods, such as those in this thesis, are necessary to reliably find accurate solutions to geometric sensor data alignment problems

Automatic Reconstruction of Textured 3D Models

Three dimensional modeling and visualization of environments is an increasingly important problem. This work addresses the problem of automatic 3D reconstruction and we present a system for unsupervised reconstruction of textured 3D models in the context of modeling indoor environments. We present solutions to all aspects of the modeling process and an integrated system for the automatic creation of large scale 3D models

Discovering Regularity in Point Clouds of Urban Scenes

Despite the apparent chaos of the urban environment, cities are actually replete with regularity. From the grid of streets laid out over the earth, to the lattice of windows thrown up into the sky, periodic regularity abounds in the urban scene. Just as salient, though less uniform, are the self-similar branching patterns of trees and vegetation that line streets and fill parks. We propose novel methods for discovering these regularities in 3D range scans acquired by a time-of-flight laser sensor. The applications of this regularity information are broad, and we present two original algorithms. The first exploits the efficiency of the Fourier transform for the real-time detection of periodicity in building facades. Periodic regularity is discovered online by doing a plane sweep across the scene and analyzing the frequency space of each column in the sweep. The simplicity and online nature of this algorithm allow it to be embedded in scanner hardware, making periodicity detection a built-in feature of future 3D cameras. We demonstrate the usefulness of periodicity in view registration, compression, segmentation, and facade reconstruction. The second algorithm leverages the hierarchical decomposition and locality in space of the wavelet transform to find stochastic parameters for procedural models that succinctly describe vegetation. These procedural models facilitate the generation of virtual worlds for architecture, gaming, and augmented reality. The self-similarity of vegetation can be inferred using multi-resolution analysis to discover the underlying branching patterns. We present a unified framework of these tools, enabling the modeling, transmission, and compression of high-resolution, accurate, and immersive 3D images

Rotational Subgroup Voting and Pose Clustering for Robust 3D Object Recognition

It is possible to associate a highly constrained subset of relative 6 DoF poses between two 3D shapes, as long as the local surface orientation, the normal vector, is available at every surface point. Local shape features can be used to find putative point correspondences between the models due to their ability to handle noisy and incomplete data. However, this correspondence set is usually contaminated by outliers in practical scenarios, which has led to many past contributions based on robust detectors such as the Hough transform or RANSAC. The key insight of our work is that a single correspondence between oriented points on the two models is constrained to cast votes in a 1 DoF rotational subgroup of the full group of poses, SE(3). Kernel density estimation allows combining the set of votes efficiently to determine a full 6 DoF candidate pose between the models. This modal pose with the highest density is stable under challenging conditions, such as noise, clutter, and occlusions, and provides the output estimate of our method. We first analyze the robustness of our method in relation to noise and show that it handles high outlier rates much better than RANSAC for the task of 6 DoF pose estimation. We then apply our method to four state of the art data sets for 3D object recognition that contain occluded and cluttered scenes. Our method achieves perfect recall on two LIDAR data sets and outperforms competing methods on two RGB-D data sets, thus setting a new standard for general 3D object recognition using point cloud data.Comment: Accepted for International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 201