10,262 research outputs found
A Joint 3D-2D based Method for Free Space Detection on Roads
In this paper, we address the problem of road segmentation and free space
detection in the context of autonomous driving. Traditional methods either use
3-dimensional (3D) cues such as point clouds obtained from LIDAR, RADAR or
stereo cameras or 2-dimensional (2D) cues such as lane markings, road
boundaries and object detection. Typical 3D point clouds do not have enough
resolution to detect fine differences in heights such as between road and
pavement. Image based 2D cues fail when encountering uneven road textures such
as due to shadows, potholes, lane markings or road restoration. We propose a
novel free road space detection technique combining both 2D and 3D cues. In
particular, we use CNN based road segmentation from 2D images and plane/box
fitting on sparse depth data obtained from SLAM as priors to formulate an
energy minimization using conditional random field (CRF), for road pixels
classification. While the CNN learns the road texture and is unaffected by
depth boundaries, the 3D information helps in overcoming texture based
classification failures. Finally, we use the obtained road segmentation with
the 3D depth data from monocular SLAM to detect the free space for the
navigation purposes. Our experiments on KITTI odometry dataset, Camvid dataset,
as well as videos captured by us, validate the superiority of the proposed
approach over the state of the art.Comment: Accepted for publication at IEEE WACV 201
Data Imputation through the Identification of Local Anomalies
We introduce a comprehensive and statistical framework in a model free
setting for a complete treatment of localized data corruptions due to severe
noise sources, e.g., an occluder in the case of a visual recording. Within this
framework, we propose i) a novel algorithm to efficiently separate, i.e.,
detect and localize, possible corruptions from a given suspicious data instance
and ii) a Maximum A Posteriori (MAP) estimator to impute the corrupted data. As
a generalization to Euclidean distance, we also propose a novel distance
measure, which is based on the ranked deviations among the data attributes and
empirically shown to be superior in separating the corruptions. Our algorithm
first splits the suspicious instance into parts through a binary partitioning
tree in the space of data attributes and iteratively tests those parts to
detect local anomalies using the nominal statistics extracted from an
uncorrupted (clean) reference data set. Once each part is labeled as anomalous
vs normal, the corresponding binary patterns over this tree that characterize
corruptions are identified and the affected attributes are imputed. Under a
certain conditional independency structure assumed for the binary patterns, we
analytically show that the false alarm rate of the introduced algorithm in
detecting the corruptions is independent of the data and can be directly set
without any parameter tuning. The proposed framework is tested over several
well-known machine learning data sets with synthetically generated corruptions;
and experimentally shown to produce remarkable improvements in terms of
classification purposes with strong corruption separation capabilities. Our
experiments also indicate that the proposed algorithms outperform the typical
approaches and are robust to varying training phase conditions
Semantic Mapping of Road Scenes
The problem of understanding road scenes has been on the fore-front in the computer vision community
for the last couple of years. This enables autonomous systems to navigate and understand
the surroundings in which it operates. It involves reconstructing the scene and estimating the objects
present in it, such as ‘vehicles’, ‘road’, ‘pavements’ and ‘buildings’. This thesis focusses on these
aspects and proposes solutions to address them.
First, we propose a solution to generate a dense semantic map from multiple street-level images.
This map can be imagined as the bird’s eye view of the region with associated semantic labels for
ten’s of kilometres of street level data. We generate the overhead semantic view from street level
images. This is in contrast to existing approaches using satellite/overhead imagery for classification
of urban region, allowing us to produce a detailed semantic map for a large scale urban area. Then
we describe a method to perform large scale dense 3D reconstruction of road scenes with associated
semantic labels. Our method fuses the depth-maps in an online fashion, generated from the
stereo pairs across time into a global 3D volume, in order to accommodate arbitrarily long image
sequences. The object class labels estimated from the street level stereo image sequence are used to
annotate the reconstructed volume. Then we exploit the scene structure in object class labelling by
performing inference over the meshed representation of the scene. By performing labelling over the
mesh we solve two issues: Firstly, images often have redundant information with multiple images
describing the same scene. Solving these images separately is slow, where our method is approximately
a magnitude faster in the inference stage compared to normal inference in the image domain.
Secondly, often multiple images, even though they describe the same scene result in inconsistent
labelling. By solving a single mesh, we remove the inconsistency of labelling across the images.
Also our mesh based labelling takes into account of the object layout in the scene, which is often
ambiguous in the image domain, thereby increasing the accuracy of object labelling. Finally, we perform
labelling and structure computation through a hierarchical robust PN Markov Random Field
defined on voxels and super-voxels given by an octree. This allows us to infer the 3D structure and
the object-class labels in a principled manner, through bounded approximate minimisation of a well
defined and studied energy functional. In this thesis, we also introduce two object labelled datasets
created from real world data. The 15 kilometre Yotta Labelled dataset consists of 8,000 images per
camera view of the roadways of the United Kingdom with a subset of them annotated with object
class labels and the second dataset is comprised of ground truth object labels for the publicly available
KITTI dataset. Both the datasets are available publicly and we hope will be helpful to the vision
research community
Lidar-based Obstacle Detection and Recognition for Autonomous Agricultural Vehicles
Today, agricultural vehicles are available that can drive autonomously and follow exact route plans more precisely than human operators. Combined with advancements in precision agriculture, autonomous agricultural robots can reduce manual labor, improve workflow, and optimize yield. However, as of today, human operators are still required for monitoring the environment and acting upon potential obstacles in front of the vehicle. To eliminate this need, safety must be ensured by accurate and reliable obstacle detection and avoidance systems.In this thesis, lidar-based obstacle detection and recognition in agricultural environments has been investigated. A rotating multi-beam lidar generating 3D point clouds was used for point-wise classification of agricultural scenes, while multi-modal fusion with cameras and radar was used to increase performance and robustness. Two research perception platforms were presented and used for data acquisition. The proposed methods were all evaluated on recorded datasets that represented a wide range of realistic agricultural environments and included both static and dynamic obstacles.For 3D point cloud classification, two methods were proposed for handling density variations during feature extraction. One method outperformed a frequently used generic 3D feature descriptor, whereas the other method showed promising preliminary results using deep learning on 2D range images. For multi-modal fusion, four methods were proposed for combining lidar with color camera, thermal camera, and radar. Gradual improvements in classification accuracy were seen, as spatial, temporal, and multi-modal relationships were introduced in the models. Finally, occupancy grid mapping was used to fuse and map detections globally, and runtime obstacle detection was applied on mapped detections along the vehicle path, thus simulating an actual traversal.The proposed methods serve as a first step towards full autonomy for agricultural vehicles. The study has thus shown that recent advancements in autonomous driving can be transferred to the agricultural domain, when accurate distinctions are made between obstacles and processable vegetation. Future research in the domain has further been facilitated with the release of the multi-modal obstacle dataset, FieldSAFE
A multi-resolution, non-parametric, Bayesian framework for identification of spatially-varying model parameters
This paper proposes a hierarchical, multi-resolution framework for the
identification of model parameters and their spatially variability from noisy
measurements of the response or output. Such parameters are frequently
encountered in PDE-based models and correspond to quantities such as density or
pressure fields, elasto-plastic moduli and internal variables in solid
mechanics, conductivity fields in heat diffusion problems, permeability fields
in fluid flow through porous media etc. The proposed model has all the
advantages of traditional Bayesian formulations such as the ability to produce
measures of confidence for the inferences made and providing not only
predictive estimates but also quantitative measures of the predictive
uncertainty. In contrast to existing approaches it utilizes a parsimonious,
non-parametric formulation that favors sparse representations and whose
complexity can be determined from the data. The proposed framework in
non-intrusive and makes use of a sequence of forward solvers operating at
various resolutions. As a result, inexpensive, coarse solvers are used to
identify the most salient features of the unknown field(s) which are
subsequently enriched by invoking solvers operating at finer resolutions. This
leads to significant computational savings particularly in problems involving
computationally demanding forward models but also improvements in accuracy. It
is based on a novel, adaptive scheme based on Sequential Monte Carlo sampling
which is embarrassingly parallelizable and circumvents issues with slow mixing
encountered in Markov Chain Monte Carlo schemes
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