Mapping, Localization and Path Planning for Image-based Navigation using Visual Features and Map

Building on progress in feature representations for image retrieval, image-based localization has seen a surge of research interest. Image-based localization has the advantage of being inexpensive and efficient, often avoiding the use of 3D metric maps altogether. That said, the need to maintain a large number of reference images as an effective support of localization in a scene, nonetheless calls for them to be organized in a map structure of some kind. The problem of localization often arises as part of a navigation process. We are, therefore, interested in summarizing the reference images as a set of landmarks, which meet the requirements for image-based navigation. A contribution of this paper is to formulate such a set of requirements for the two sub-tasks involved: map construction and self-localization. These requirements are then exploited for compact map representation and accurate self-localization, using the framework of a network flow problem. During this process, we formulate the map construction and self-localization problems as convex quadratic and second-order cone programs, respectively. We evaluate our methods on publicly available indoor and outdoor datasets, where they outperform existing methods significantly.Comment: CVPR 2019, for implementation see https://github.com/janinethom

Sparse Representation of Astronomical Images

Sparse representation of astronomical images is discussed. It is shown that a significant gain in sparsity is achieved when particular mixed dictionaries are used for approximating these types of images with greedy selection strategies. Experiments are conducted to confirm: i)Effectiveness at producing sparse representations. ii)Competitiveness, with respect to the time required to process large images.The latter is a consequence of the suitability of the proposed dictionaries for approximating images in partitions of small blocks.This feature makes it possible to apply the effective greedy selection technique Orthogonal Matching Pursuit, up to some block size. For blocks exceeding that size a refinement of the original Matching Pursuit approach is considered. The resulting method is termed Self Projected Matching Pursuit, because is shown to be effective for implementing, via Matching Pursuit itself, the optional back-projection intermediate steps in that approach.Comment: Software to implement the approach is available on http://www.nonlinear-approx.info/examples/node1.htm

Perceptually Motivated Shape Context Which Uses Shape Interiors

In this paper, we identify some of the limitations of current-day shape matching techniques. We provide examples of how contour-based shape matching techniques cannot provide a good match for certain visually similar shapes. To overcome this limitation, we propose a perceptually motivated variant of the well-known shape context descriptor. We identify that the interior properties of the shape play an important role in object recognition and develop a descriptor that captures these interior properties. We show that our method can easily be augmented with any other shape matching algorithm. We also show from our experiments that the use of our descriptor can significantly improve the retrieval rates