19,171 research outputs found
Vision Based Localization under Dynamic Illumination
Localization in dynamically illuminated environments is often difficult due to static objects casting dynamic shadows. Feature extraction algorithms may detect both the objects and their shadows, producing conflict in localization algorithms. This work examines a colour model that separates brightness from chromaticity and applies it to eliminate features caused by dynamic illumination. The colour model is applied in two novel ways. Firstly, the chromaticity distortion of a single feature is used to determine if the feature is the result of illumination alone i.e. a shadow. Secondly, the chromaticity distortion of features matched between images is examined to determine if the monochrome based algorithm has matched them correctly. These two applications are put through a variety of tests in simulated then real world environments to assess their effectiveness in dynamically illuminated scenarios. The results demonstrate a significant reduction in the number of feature mismatches between images with dynamic light sources. The evaluation of the techniques individually in a Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) task show substantial improvements in accuracy, with the combination of the two techniques producing a localization result that is highly robust to the environmental lighting
Panoramic Annular Localizer: Tackling the Variation Challenges of Outdoor Localization Using Panoramic Annular Images and Active Deep Descriptors
Visual localization is an attractive problem that estimates the camera
localization from database images based on the query image. It is a crucial
task for various applications, such as autonomous vehicles, assistive
navigation and augmented reality. The challenging issues of the task lie in
various appearance variations between query and database images, including
illumination variations, dynamic object variations and viewpoint variations. In
order to tackle those challenges, Panoramic Annular Localizer into which
panoramic annular lens and robust deep image descriptors are incorporated is
proposed in this paper. The panoramic annular images captured by the single
camera are processed and fed into the NetVLAD network to form the active deep
descriptor, and sequential matching is utilized to generate the localization
result. The experiments carried on the public datasets and in the field
illustrate the validation of the proposed system.Comment: Accepted by ITSC 201
Learning Matchable Image Transformations for Long-term Metric Visual Localization
Long-term metric self-localization is an essential capability of autonomous
mobile robots, but remains challenging for vision-based systems due to
appearance changes caused by lighting, weather, or seasonal variations. While
experience-based mapping has proven to be an effective technique for bridging
the `appearance gap,' the number of experiences required for reliable metric
localization over days or months can be very large, and methods for reducing
the necessary number of experiences are needed for this approach to scale.
Taking inspiration from color constancy theory, we learn a nonlinear
RGB-to-grayscale mapping that explicitly maximizes the number of inlier feature
matches for images captured under different lighting and weather conditions,
and use it as a pre-processing step in a conventional single-experience
localization pipeline to improve its robustness to appearance change. We train
this mapping by approximating the target non-differentiable localization
pipeline with a deep neural network, and find that incorporating a learned
low-dimensional context feature can further improve cross-appearance feature
matching. Using synthetic and real-world datasets, we demonstrate substantial
improvements in localization performance across day-night cycles, enabling
continuous metric localization over a 30-hour period using a single mapping
experience, and allowing experience-based localization to scale to long
deployments with dramatically reduced data requirements.Comment: In IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L) and presented at the
IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA'20), Paris,
France, May 31-June 4, 202
Deep Drone Racing: From Simulation to Reality with Domain Randomization
Dynamically changing environments, unreliable state estimation, and operation
under severe resource constraints are fundamental challenges that limit the
deployment of small autonomous drones. We address these challenges in the
context of autonomous, vision-based drone racing in dynamic environments. A
racing drone must traverse a track with possibly moving gates at high speed. We
enable this functionality by combining the performance of a state-of-the-art
planning and control system with the perceptual awareness of a convolutional
neural network (CNN). The resulting modular system is both platform- and
domain-independent: it is trained in simulation and deployed on a physical
quadrotor without any fine-tuning. The abundance of simulated data, generated
via domain randomization, makes our system robust to changes of illumination
and gate appearance. To the best of our knowledge, our approach is the first to
demonstrate zero-shot sim-to-real transfer on the task of agile drone flight.
We extensively test the precision and robustness of our system, both in
simulation and on a physical platform, and show significant improvements over
the state of the art.Comment: Accepted as a Regular Paper to the IEEE Transactions on Robotics
Journal. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1806.0854
How to Train a CAT: Learning Canonical Appearance Transformations for Direct Visual Localization Under Illumination Change
Direct visual localization has recently enjoyed a resurgence in popularity
with the increasing availability of cheap mobile computing power. The
competitive accuracy and robustness of these algorithms compared to
state-of-the-art feature-based methods, as well as their natural ability to
yield dense maps, makes them an appealing choice for a variety of mobile
robotics applications. However, direct methods remain brittle in the face of
appearance change due to their underlying assumption of photometric
consistency, which is commonly violated in practice. In this paper, we propose
to mitigate this problem by training deep convolutional encoder-decoder models
to transform images of a scene such that they correspond to a previously-seen
canonical appearance. We validate our method in multiple environments and
illumination conditions using high-fidelity synthetic RGB-D datasets, and
integrate the trained models into a direct visual localization pipeline,
yielding improvements in visual odometry (VO) accuracy through time-varying
illumination conditions, as well as improved metric relocalization performance
under illumination change, where conventional methods normally fail. We further
provide a preliminary investigation of transfer learning from synthetic to real
environments in a localization context. An open-source implementation of our
method using PyTorch is available at https://github.com/utiasSTARS/cat-net.Comment: In IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L) and presented at the
IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA'18), Brisbane,
Australia, May 21-25, 201
Vision-based Real-Time Aerial Object Localization and Tracking for UAV Sensing System
The paper focuses on the problem of vision-based obstacle detection and
tracking for unmanned aerial vehicle navigation. A real-time object
localization and tracking strategy from monocular image sequences is developed
by effectively integrating the object detection and tracking into a dynamic
Kalman model. At the detection stage, the object of interest is automatically
detected and localized from a saliency map computed via the image background
connectivity cue at each frame; at the tracking stage, a Kalman filter is
employed to provide a coarse prediction of the object state, which is further
refined via a local detector incorporating the saliency map and the temporal
information between two consecutive frames. Compared to existing methods, the
proposed approach does not require any manual initialization for tracking, runs
much faster than the state-of-the-art trackers of its kind, and achieves
competitive tracking performance on a large number of image sequences.
Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and superior performance of
the proposed approach.Comment: 8 pages, 7 figure
Optical techniques for 3D surface reconstruction in computer-assisted laparoscopic surgery
One of the main challenges for computer-assisted surgery (CAS) is to determine the intra-opera- tive morphology and motion of soft-tissues. This information is prerequisite to the registration of multi-modal patient-specific data for enhancing the surgeon’s navigation capabilites by observ- ing beyond exposed tissue surfaces and for providing intelligent control of robotic-assisted in- struments. In minimally invasive surgery (MIS), optical techniques are an increasingly attractive approach for in vivo 3D reconstruction of the soft-tissue surface geometry. This paper reviews the state-of-the-art methods for optical intra-operative 3D reconstruction in laparoscopic surgery and discusses the technical challenges and future perspectives towards clinical translation. With the recent paradigm shift of surgical practice towards MIS and new developments in 3D opti- cal imaging, this is a timely discussion about technologies that could facilitate complex CAS procedures in dynamic and deformable anatomical regions
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