2,037 research outputs found
High-Performance and Tunable Stereo Reconstruction
Traditional stereo algorithms have focused their efforts on reconstruction
quality and have largely avoided prioritizing for run time performance. Robots,
on the other hand, require quick maneuverability and effective computation to
observe its immediate environment and perform tasks within it. In this work, we
propose a high-performance and tunable stereo disparity estimation method, with
a peak frame-rate of 120Hz (VGA resolution, on a single CPU-thread), that can
potentially enable robots to quickly reconstruct their immediate surroundings
and maneuver at high-speeds. Our key contribution is a disparity estimation
algorithm that iteratively approximates the scene depth via a piece-wise planar
mesh from stereo imagery, with a fast depth validation step for semi-dense
reconstruction. The mesh is initially seeded with sparsely matched keypoints,
and is recursively tessellated and refined as needed (via a resampling stage),
to provide the desired stereo disparity accuracy. The inherent simplicity and
speed of our approach, with the ability to tune it to a desired reconstruction
quality and runtime performance makes it a compelling solution for applications
in high-speed vehicles.Comment: Accepted to International Conference on Robotics and Automation
(ICRA) 2016; 8 pages, 5 figure
Guided Stereo Matching
Stereo is a prominent technique to infer dense depth maps from images, and
deep learning further pushed forward the state-of-the-art, making end-to-end
architectures unrivaled when enough data is available for training. However,
deep networks suffer from significant drops in accuracy when dealing with new
environments. Therefore, in this paper, we introduce Guided Stereo Matching, a
novel paradigm leveraging a small amount of sparse, yet reliable depth
measurements retrieved from an external source enabling to ameliorate this
weakness. The additional sparse cues required by our method can be obtained
with any strategy (e.g., a LiDAR) and used to enhance features linked to
corresponding disparity hypotheses. Our formulation is general and fully
differentiable, thus enabling to exploit the additional sparse inputs in
pre-trained deep stereo networks as well as for training a new instance from
scratch. Extensive experiments on three standard datasets and two
state-of-the-art deep architectures show that even with a small set of sparse
input cues, i) the proposed paradigm enables significant improvements to
pre-trained networks. Moreover, ii) training from scratch notably increases
accuracy and robustness to domain shifts. Finally, iii) it is suited and
effective even with traditional stereo algorithms such as SGM.Comment: CVPR 201
Fast, Accurate Thin-Structure Obstacle Detection for Autonomous Mobile Robots
Safety is paramount for mobile robotic platforms such as self-driving cars
and unmanned aerial vehicles. This work is devoted to a task that is
indispensable for safety yet was largely overlooked in the past -- detecting
obstacles that are of very thin structures, such as wires, cables and tree
branches. This is a challenging problem, as thin objects can be problematic for
active sensors such as lidar and sonar and even for stereo cameras. In this
work, we propose to use video sequences for thin obstacle detection. We
represent obstacles with edges in the video frames, and reconstruct them in 3D
using efficient edge-based visual odometry techniques. We provide both a
monocular camera solution and a stereo camera solution. The former incorporates
Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) data to solve scale ambiguity, while the latter
enjoys a novel, purely vision-based solution. Experiments demonstrated that the
proposed methods are fast and able to detect thin obstacles robustly and
accurately under various conditions.Comment: Appeared at IEEE CVPR 2017 Workshop on Embedded Visio
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