Past, Present, and Future of Simultaneous Localization And Mapping: Towards the Robust-Perception Age

Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM)consists in the concurrent construction of a model of the environment (the map), and the estimation of the state of the robot moving within it. The SLAM community has made astonishing progress over the last 30 years, enabling large-scale real-world applications, and witnessing a steady transition of this technology to industry. We survey the current state of SLAM. We start by presenting what is now the de-facto standard formulation for SLAM. We then review related work, covering a broad set of topics including robustness and scalability in long-term mapping, metric and semantic representations for mapping, theoretical performance guarantees, active SLAM and exploration, and other new frontiers. This paper simultaneously serves as a position paper and tutorial to those who are users of SLAM. By looking at the published research with a critical eye, we delineate open challenges and new research issues, that still deserve careful scientific investigation. The paper also contains the authors' take on two questions that often animate discussions during robotics conferences: Do robots need SLAM? and Is SLAM solved

General Dynamic Scene Reconstruction from Multiple View Video

This paper introduces a general approach to dynamic scene reconstruction from multiple moving cameras without prior knowledge or limiting constraints on the scene structure, appearance, or illumination. Existing techniques for dynamic scene reconstruction from multiple wide-baseline camera views primarily focus on accurate reconstruction in controlled environments, where the cameras are fixed and calibrated and background is known. These approaches are not robust for general dynamic scenes captured with sparse moving cameras. Previous approaches for outdoor dynamic scene reconstruction assume prior knowledge of the static background appearance and structure. The primary contributions of this paper are twofold: an automatic method for initial coarse dynamic scene segmentation and reconstruction without prior knowledge of background appearance or structure; and a general robust approach for joint segmentation refinement and dense reconstruction of dynamic scenes from multiple wide-baseline static or moving cameras. Evaluation is performed on a variety of indoor and outdoor scenes with cluttered backgrounds and multiple dynamic non-rigid objects such as people. Comparison with state-of-the-art approaches demonstrates improved accuracy in both multiple view segmentation and dense reconstruction. The proposed approach also eliminates the requirement for prior knowledge of scene structure and appearance

RGBD Datasets: Past, Present and Future

Since the launch of the Microsoft Kinect, scores of RGBD datasets have been released. These have propelled advances in areas from reconstruction to gesture recognition. In this paper we explore the field, reviewing datasets across eight categories: semantics, object pose estimation, camera tracking, scene reconstruction, object tracking, human actions, faces and identification. By extracting relevant information in each category we help researchers to find appropriate data for their needs, and we consider which datasets have succeeded in driving computer vision forward and why. Finally, we examine the future of RGBD datasets. We identify key areas which are currently underexplored, and suggest that future directions may include synthetic data and dense reconstructions of static and dynamic scenes.Comment: 8 pages excluding references (CVPR style

How do robots take two parts apart

This research is a natural progression of efforts which begun with the introduction of a new research paradigm in machine perception, called Active Perception. There it was stated that Active Perception is a problem of intelligent control strategies applied to data acquisition processes which will depend on the current state of the data interpretation, including recognition. The disassembly/assembly problem is treated as an Active Perception problem, and a method for autonomous disassembly based on this framework is presented

Assembly via disassembly: A case in machine perceptual development

First results in the effort of learning about representations of objects is presented. The questions attempted to be answered are: What is innate and what must be derived from the environment. The problem is casted in the framework of disassembly of an object into two parts

Cognitive visual tracking and camera control

Cognitive visual tracking is the process of observing and understanding the behaviour of a moving person. This paper presents an efficient solution to extract, in real-time, high-level information from an observed scene, and generate the most appropriate commands for a set of pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ) cameras in a surveillance scenario. Such a high-level feedback control loop, which is the main novelty of our work, will serve to reduce uncertainties in the observed scene and to maximize the amount of information extracted from it. It is implemented with a distributed camera system using SQL tables as virtual communication channels, and Situation Graph Trees for knowledge representation, inference and high-level camera control. A set of experiments in a surveillance scenario show the effectiveness of our approach and its potential for real applications of cognitive vision

Serious Games in Cultural Heritage

Although the widespread use of gaming for leisure purposes has been well documented, the use of games to support cultural heritage purposes, such as historical teaching and learning, or for enhancing museum visits, has been less well considered. The state-of-the-art in serious game technology is identical to that of the state-of-the-art in entertainment games technology. As a result the field of serious heritage games concerns itself with recent advances in computer games, real-time computer graphics, virtual and augmented reality and artificial intelligence. On the other hand, the main strengths of serious gaming applications may be generalised as being in the areas of communication, visual expression of information, collaboration mechanisms, interactivity and entertainment. In this report, we will focus on the state-of-the-art with respect to the theories, methods and technologies used in serious heritage games. We provide an overview of existing literature of relevance to the domain, discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the described methods and point out unsolved problems and challenges. In addition, several case studies illustrating the application of methods and technologies used in cultural heritage are presented