GSLAM: Initialization-robust Monocular Visual SLAM via Global Structure-from-Motion

Many monocular visual SLAM algorithms are derived from incremental structure-from-motion (SfM) methods. This work proposes a novel monocular SLAM method which integrates recent advances made in global SfM. In particular, we present two main contributions to visual SLAM. First, we solve the visual odometry problem by a novel rank-1 matrix factorization technique which is more robust to the errors in map initialization. Second, we adopt a recent global SfM method for the pose-graph optimization, which leads to a multi-stage linear formulation and enables L1 optimization for better robustness to false loops. The combination of these two approaches generates more robust reconstruction and is significantly faster (4X) than recent state-of-the-art SLAM systems. We also present a new dataset recorded with ground truth camera motion in a Vicon motion capture room, and compare our method to prior systems on it and established benchmark datasets.Comment: 3DV 2017 Project Page: https://frobelbest.github.io/gsla

Linear Global Translation Estimation with Feature Tracks

This paper derives a novel linear position constraint for cameras seeing a common scene point, which leads to a direct linear method for global camera translation estimation. Unlike previous solutions, this method deals with collinear camera motion and weak image association at the same time. The final linear formulation does not involve the coordinates of scene points, which makes it efficient even for large scale data. We solve the linear equation based on $L_1$ norm, which makes our system more robust to outliers in essential matrices and feature correspondences. We experiment this method on both sequentially captured images and unordered Internet images. The experiments demonstrate its strength in robustness, accuracy, and efficiency.Comment: Changes: 1. Adopt BMVC2015 style; 2. Combine sections 3 and 5; 3. Move "Evaluation on synthetic data" out to supplementary file; 4. Divide subsection "Evaluation on general data" to subsections "Experiment on sequential data" and "Experiment on unordered Internet data"; 5. Change Fig. 1 and Fig.8; 6. Move Fig. 6 and Fig. 7 to supplementary file; 7 Change some symbols; 8. Correct some typo

Opportunistic transmission scheduling for next generation wireless communication systems with multimedia services

The explosive growth of the Internet and the continued dramatic increase for all wireless services are fueling the demand for increased capacity, data rates, and support of different quality of service (QoS) requirements for different classes of services. Since in the current and future wireless communication infrastructures, the performances of the various services are strongly correlated, as the resources are shared among them, dynamic resource allocation methods should be employed. With the demand for high data rate and support of multiple QoS, the transmission scheduling plays a key role in the efficient resource allocation process in wireless systems. The fundamental problem of scheduling the users\u27 transmissions and allocating the available resources in a realistic CDMA wireless system that supports multi-rate multimedia services, with efficiency and fairness, is investigated and analyzed in this dissertation. Our proposed approach adopts the use of dynamically assigned data rates that match the channel capacity in order to improve the system throughput and overcome the problems associated with the location-dependent and time-dependent errors and channel conditions, the variable system capacity and the transmission power limitation. We first introduce and describe two new scheduling algorithms, namely the Channel Adaptive Rate Scheduling (CARS) and Fair Channel Adaptive Rate Scheduling (FCARS). CARS exploits the channel variations to reach high throughput, by adjusting the transmission rates according to the varying channel conditions and by performing an iterative procedure to determine the power index that a user can accept by its current channel condition and transmission power. Based on the assignment of CARS and to overcome potential unfair service allocation, FCARS implements a compensation algorithm, in which the lagging users can receive compensation service when the corresponding channel conditions improve, in order to achieve asymptotic throughput fairness, while still maintaining all the constraints imposed by the system. Furthermore the problem of opportunistic fair scheduling in the uplink transmission of CDMA systems, with the objective of maximizing the uplink system throughput, while satisfying the users\u27 QoS requirements and maintaining the long-term fairness among the various users despite their different varying channel conditions, is rigorously formulated, and a throughput optimal fair scheduling policy is obtained. The corresponding problem is expressed as a weighted throughput maximization problem, under certain power and QoS constraints, where the weights are the control parameters that reflect the fairness constraints. With the introduction of the power index capacity it is shown that this optimization problem can be converted into a binary knapsack problem, where all the corresponding constraints are replaced by the users\u27 power index capacities at some certain system power index. It is then argued that the optimal solution can be obtained as a global search within a certain range, while a stochastic approximation method is presented in order to effectively identify the required control parameters. Finally, since some real-time services may demand certain amount of service within specific short span of time in order to avoid service delays, the problem of designing policies that can achieve high throughput while at the same time maintain short term fairness, is also considered and investigated. To this end a new Credit-based Short-term Fairness Scheduling (CSFS) algorithm, which achieves to provide short-term fairness to the delay-sensitive users while still schedules opportunistically the non-delay-sensitive users to obtain high system throughput, is proposed and evaluated

Change detection in SAR images based on the salient map guidance and an accelerated genetic algorithm

This paper proposes a change detection algorithm in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images based on the salient image guidance and an accelerated genetic algorithm (S-aGA). The difference image is first generated by logarithm ratio operator based on the bi-temporal SAR images acquired in the same region. Then a saliency detection model is applied in the difference image to extract the salient regions containing the changed class pixels. The salient regions are further divided by fuzzy c-means (FCM) clustering algorithm into three categories: changed class (set of pixels with high gray values), unchanged class (set of pixels with low gray values) and undetermined class (set of pixels with middle gray value, which are difficult to classify). Finally, the proposed accelerated GA is applied to explore the reduced search space formed by the undetermined-class pixels according to an objective function considering neighborhood information. In S-aGA, an efficient mutation operator is designed by using the neighborhood information of undetermined-class pixels as the heuristic information to determine the mutation probability of each undetermined-class pixel adaptively, which accelerates the convergence of the GA significantly. The experimental results on two data sets demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed S-aGA. On the whole, S-aGA outperforms five other existing methods including the simple GA in terms of detection accuracy. In addition, S-aGA could obtain satisfying solution within limited generations, converging much faster than the simple GA

Acute epiglottitis caused by COVID-19: A systematic review

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused substantial population infections worldwide. COVID-19 has been reported to cause acute epiglottitis (AE); nonetheless, COVID-19-related AE is poorly understood by healthcare workers because of the disease’s low occurrence. This systematic review aimed to improve knowledge of the clinical characteristics of COVID-19-related AE. We conducted a comprehensive search of the literature databases PubMed, Web of Science, Embase, and Scopus, using various keywords and descriptors such as "COVID-19," "SARS-CoV-2," and "AE" in combination with the AND/OR operator. This review included 11 patients with COVID-19-related AE, all of whom were adults except for one 15-year-old girl. COVID-19-related AE was more prevalent in males, who accounted for 81.8% of patients. Patients with COVID-19-related AE experienced symptoms such as hoarseness, dysphagia, odynophagia, sore throat, and dyspnea. Hoarseness may be one of the typical symptoms of COVID-19-related AE. Five patients with COVID-19-related AE had coexisting diseases, including hypertension, obesity, diabetes, obstructive sleep apnea, Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome, and intracranial tumors. Antibiotics and steroids were commonly administered. Five patients with COVID-19-related AE underwent intubation and cricothyroidotomy airway management. Due to the low success rate of intubation, emergency tracheotomy is the recommended option for patients with COVID-19-related AE who present with more severe dyspnea. AE could be an uncommon manifestation of COVID-19, and SARS-CoV-2 infection should be considered as a possible cause of AE. Healthcare workers should be vigilant in recognizing COVID-19-related AE.