ICPR2020 Paper Browser

Paper download is intended for registered attendees only, and is subjected to the IEEE Copyright Policy. Any other use is strongly forbidden.

Benchmarking Cameras for OpenVSLAM Indoors

Kevin Chappellet, Guillaume Caron, Fumio Kanehiro, Ken Sakurada, Abderrahmane Kheddar

Auto-TLDR; OpenVSLAM: Benchmarking Camera Types for Visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping

Abstract Slides Poster

In this paper we benchmark different types of cameras and evaluate their performance in terms of reliable localization reliability and precision in Visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (vSLAM). Such benchmarking is merely found for visual odometry, but never for vSLAM. Existing studies usually compare several algorithms for a given camera. %This work is the first to handle the dual of the latter, i.e. comparing several cameras for a given SLAM algorithm. The evaluation methodology we propose is applied to the recent OpenVSLAM framework. The latter is versatile enough to natively deal with perspective, fisheye, 360 cameras in a monocular or stereoscopic setup, an in RGB or RGB-D modalities. Results in various sequences containing light variation and scenery modifications in the scene assess quantitatively the maximum localization rate for 360 vision. In the contrary, RGB-D vision shows the lowest localization rate, but highest precision when localization is possible. Stereo-fisheye trades-off with localization rates and precision between 360 vision and RGB-D vision. The dataset with ground truth will be made available in open access to allow evaluating other/future vSLAM algorithms with respect to these camera types.

Similar papers

RISEdb: A Novel Indoor Localization Dataset

Carlos Sanchez Belenguer, Erik Wolfart, Álvaro Casado Coscollá, Vitor Sequeira

Auto-TLDR; Indoor Localization Using LiDAR SLAM and Smartphones: A Benchmarking Dataset

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

In this paper we introduce a novel public dataset for developing and benchmarking indoor localization systems. We have selected and 3D mapped a set of representative indoor environments including a large office building, a conference room, a workshop, an exhibition area and a restaurant. Our acquisition pipeline is based on a portable LiDAR SLAM backpack to map the buildings and to accurately track the pose of the user as it moves freely inside them. We introduce the calibration procedures that enable us to acquire and geo-reference live data coming from different independent sensors rigidly attached to the backpack. This has allowed us to collect long sequences of spherical and stereo images, together with all the sensor readings coming from a consumer smartphone and locate them inside the map with centimetre accuracy. The dataset addresses many of the limitations of existing indoor localization datasets regarding the scale and diversity of the mapped buildings; the number of acquired sequences under varying conditions; the accuracy of the ground-truth trajectory; the availability of a detailed 3D model and the availability of different sensor types. It enables the benchmarking of existing and the development of new indoor localization approaches, in particular for deep learning based systems that require large amounts of labeled training data.

Learning to Segment Dynamic Objects Using SLAM Outliers

Dupont Romain, Mohamed Tamaazousti, Hervé Le Borgne

Auto-TLDR; Automatic Segmentation of Dynamic Objects Using SLAM Outliers Using Consensus Inversion

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

We present a method to automatically learn to segment dynamic objects using SLAM outliers. It requires only one monocular sequence per dynamic object for training and consists in localizing dynamic objects using SLAM outliers, creating their masks, and using these masks to train a semantic segmentation network. We integrate the trained network in ORB-SLAM 2 and LDSO. At runtime we remove features on dynamic objects, making the SLAM unaffected by them. We also propose a new stereo dataset and new metrics to evaluate SLAM robustness. Our dataset includes consensus inversions, i.e., situations where the SLAM uses more features on dynamic objects that on the static background. Consensus inversions are challenging for SLAM as they may cause major SLAM failures. Our approach performs better than the State-of-the-Art on the TUM RGB-D dataset in monocular mode and on our dataset in both monocular and stereo modes.

AV-SLAM: Autonomous Vehicle SLAM with Gravity Direction Initialization

Kaan Yilmaz, Baris Suslu, Sohini Roychowdhury, L. Srikar Muppirisetty

Auto-TLDR; VI-SLAM with AGI: A combination of three SLAM algorithms for autonomous vehicles

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) algorithms that are aimed at autonomous vehicles (AVs) are required to utilize sensor redundancies specific to AVs and enable accurate, fast and repeatable estimations of pose and path trajectories. In this work, we present a combination of three SLAM algorithms that utilize a different subset of available sensors such as inertial measurement unit (IMU), a gray-scale mono-camera, and a Lidar. Also, we propose a novel acceleration-based gravity direction initialization (AGI) method for the visual-inertial SLAM algorithm. We analyze the SLAM algorithms and initialization methods for pose estimation accuracy, speed of convergence and repeatability on the KITTI odometry sequences. The proposed VI-SLAM with AGI method achieves relative pose errors less than 2\%, convergence in half a minute or less and convergence time variability less than 3s, which makes it preferable for AVs.

P2D: A Self-Supervised Method for Depth Estimation from Polarimetry

Marc Blanchon, Desire Sidibe, Olivier Morel, Ralph Seulin, Daniel Braun, Fabrice Meriaudeau

Auto-TLDR; Polarimetric Regularization for Monocular Depth Estimation

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

Monocular depth estimation is a recurring subject in the ﬁeld of computer vision. Its ability to describe scenes via a depth map while reducing the constraints related to the formulation of perspective geometry tends to favor its use. However, despite the constant improvement of algorithms, most methods exploit only colorimetric information. Consequently, robustness to events to which the modality is not sensitive to, like specularity or transparency, is neglected. In response to this phenomenon, we propose using polarimetry as an input for a self-supervised monodepth network. Therefore, we propose exploiting polarization cues to encourage accurate reconstruction of scenes. Furthermore, we include a term of polarimetric regularization to state-of-the-art method to take speciﬁc advantage of the data. Our method is evaluated both qualitatively and quantitatively demonstrating that the contribution of this new information as well as an enhanced loss function improves depth estimation results, especially for specular areas.

Extending Single Beam Lidar to Full Resolution by Fusing with Single Image Depth Estimation

Yawen Lu, Yuxing Wang, Devarth Parikh, Guoyu Lu

Auto-TLDR; Self-supervised LIDAR for Low-Cost Depth Estimation

Abstract Slides Similar

Depth estimation is playing an important role in indoor and outdoor scene understanding, autonomous driving, augmented reality and many other tasks. Vehicles and robotics are able to use active illumination sensors such as LIDAR to receive high precision depth estimation. However, high-resolution Lidars are usually too expensive, which limits its massive production on various applications. Though single beam LIDAR enjoys the benefits of low cost, one beam depth sensing is not usually sufficient to perceive the surrounding environment in many scenarios. In this paper, we propose a learning-based framework to explore to replicate similar or even higher performance as costly LIDARs with our designed self-supervised network and a low-cost single-beam LIDAR. After the accurate calibration with a visible camera, the single beam LIDAR can adjust the scale uncertainty of the depth map estimated by the visible camera. The adjusted depth map enjoys the benefits of high resolution and sensing accuracy as high beam LIDAR and maintains low-cost as single beam LIDAR. Thus we can achieve similar sensing effect of high beam LIDAR with more than a 50-100 times cheaper price (e.g., \$80000 Velodyne HDL-64E LIDAR v.s. \$1000 SICK TIM-781 2D LIDAR and normal camera). The proposed approach is verified on our collected dataset and public dataset with superior depth-sensing performance.

Rotational Adjoint Methods for Learning-Free 3D Human Pose Estimation from IMU Data

Caterina Emilia Agelide Buizza, Yiannis Demiris

Auto-TLDR; Learning-free 3D Human Pose Estimation from Inertial Measurement Unit Data

Abstract Poster Similar

We present a new framework for learning-free 3D human pose estimation from Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) data. The proposed method does not rely on a full motion sequence to calculate a pose for any particular time point and thus can operate in real-time. A cost function based only on joint rotations is used, removing the need for frequent transformations between rotations and 3D Cartesian coordinates. A Jacobian that preserves skeleton structure is derived using Adjoint methods from Variational Data Assimilation. To facilitate further research in IMU-based Motion Capture, we provide a dataset that combines RGB and depth images from an Intel RealSense camera, marker-based motion capture from an Optitrack system and Xsens IMU data. We have evaluated our method on both our dataset and the Total Capture dataset, showing an average error across 24 joints of 0.45 and 0.48 radians respectively.

NetCalib: A Novel Approach for LiDAR-Camera Auto-Calibration Based on Deep Learning

Shan Wu, Amnir Hadachi, Damien Vivet, Yadu Prabhakar

Auto-TLDR; Automatic Calibration of LiDAR and Cameras using Deep Neural Network

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

A fusion of LiDAR and cameras have been widely used in many robotics applications such as classification, segmentation, object detection, and autonomous driving. It is essential that the LiDAR sensor can measure distances accurately, which is a good complement to the cameras. Hence, calibrating sensors before deployment is a mandatory step. The conventional methods include checkerboards, specific patterns, or human labeling, which is trivial and human-labor extensive if we do the same calibration process every time. The main propose of this research work is to build a deep neural network that is capable of automatically finding the geometric transformation between LiDAR and cameras. The results show that our model manages to find the transformations from randomly sampled artificial errors. Besides, our work is open-sourced for the community to fully utilize the advances of the methodology for developing more the approach, initiating collaboration, and innovation in the topic.

Generic Merging of Structure from Motion Maps with a Low Memory Footprint

Gabrielle Flood, David Gillsjö, Patrik Persson, Anders Heyden, Kalle Åström

Auto-TLDR; A Low-Memory Footprint Representation for Robust Map Merge

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

With the development of cheap image sensors, the amount of available image data have increased enormously, and the possibility of using crowdsourced collection methods has emerged. This calls for development of ways to handle all these data. In this paper, we present new tools that will enable efficient, flexible and robust map merging. Assuming that separate optimisations have been performed for the individual maps, we show how only relevant data can be stored in a low memory footprint representation. We use these representations to perform map merging so that the algorithm is invariant to the merging order and independent of the choice of coordinate system. The result is a robust algorithm that can be applied to several maps simultaneously. The result of a merge can also be represented with the same type of low-memory footprint format, which enables further merging and updating of the map in a hierarchical way. Furthermore, the method can perform loop closing and also detect changes in the scene between the capture of the different image sequences. Using both simulated and real data — from both a hand held mobile phone and from a drone — we verify the performance of the proposed method.

Towards life-long mapping of dynamic environments using temporal persistence modeling

Georgios Tsamis, Ioannis Kostavelis, Dimitrios Giakoumis, Dimitrios Tzovaras

Auto-TLDR; Lifelong Mapping for Mobile Robot Navigation in Dynamic Environments

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

The contemporary SLAM mapping systems assume a static environment and build a map that is then used for mobile robot navigation disregarding the dynamic changes in this environment. The paper at hand presents a novel solution for the \emph{lifelong mapping} problem that continually updates a metric map represented as a 2D occupancy grid in large scale indoor environments with movable objects such as people, robots, objects etc. suitable for industrial applications. We formalize each cell's occupancy as a failure analysis problem and contribute temporal persistence modeling (TPM), an algorithm for probabilistic prediction of the time that a cell in an observed location is expected to be ``occupied" or ``empty" given sparse prior observations from a task specific mobile robot. Our work is evaluated in Gazebo simulation environment against the nominal occupancy of cells and the estimated obstacles persistence. We also show that robot navigation with lifelong mapping demands less re-plans and leads to more efficient navigation in highly dynamic environments.

Better Prior Knowledge Improves Human-Pose-Based Extrinsic Camera Calibration

Olivier Moliner, Sangxia Huang, Kalle Åström

Auto-TLDR; Improving Human-pose-based Extrinsic Calibration for Multi-Camera Systems

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

Accurate extrinsic calibration of wide baseline multi-camera systems enables better understanding of 3D scenes for many applications and is of great practical importance. Classical Structure-from-Motion calibration methods require special calibration equipment so that accurate point correspondences can be detected between different views. In addition, an operator with some training is usually needed to ensure that data is collected in a way that leads to good calibration accuracy. This limits the ease of adoption of such technologies. Recently, methods have been proposed to use human pose estimation models to establish point correspondences, thus removing the need for any special equipment. The challenge with this approach is that human pose estimation algorithms typically produce much less accurate feature points compared to classical patch-based methods. Another problem is that ambient human motion might not be optimal for calibration. We build upon prior works and introduce several novel ideas to improve the accuracy of human-pose-based extrinsic calibration. Our first contribution is a robust reprojection loss based on a better understanding of the sources of pose estimation error. Our second contribution is a 3D human pose likelihood model learned from motion capture data. We demonstrate significant improvements in calibration accuracy by evaluating our method on four publicly available datasets.

Localization of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles in Corridor Environments Using Deep Learning

Ram Padhy, Shahzad Ahmad, Sachin Verma, Sambit Bakshi, Pankaj Kumar Sa

Auto-TLDR; A monocular vision assisted localization algorithm for indoor corridor environments

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

We propose a monocular vision assisted localization algorithm, that will help a UAV navigate safely in indoor corridor environments. Always, the aim is to navigate the UAV through a corridor in the forward direction by keeping it at the center with no orientation either to the left or right side. The algorithm makes use of the RGB image, captured from the UAV front camera, and passes it through a trained Deep Neural Network (DNN) to predict the position of the UAV as either on the left or center or right side of the corridor. Depending upon the divergence of the UAV with respect to an imaginary central line, known as the central bisector line (CBL) of the corridor, a suitable command is generated to bring the UAV to the center. When the UAV is at the center of the corridor, a new image is passed through another trained DNN to predict the orientation of the UAV with respect to the CBL of the corridor. If the UAV is either left or right tilted, an appropriate command is generated to rectify the orientation. We also propose a new corridor dataset, named UAVCorV1, which contains images as captured by the UAV front camera when the UAV is at all possible locations of a variety of corridors. An exhaustive set of experiments in different corridors reveal the efficacy of the proposed algorithm.

A Two-Step Approach to Lidar-Camera Calibration

Yingna Su, Yaqing Ding, Jian Yang, Hui Kong

Auto-TLDR; Closed-Form Calibration of Lidar-camera System for Ego-motion Estimation and Scene Understanding

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

Autonomous vehicles and robots are typically equipped with Lidar and camera. Hence, calibrating the Lidar-camera system is of extreme importance for ego-motion estimation and scene understanding. In this paper, we propose a two-step approach (coarse + fine) for the external calibration between a camera and a multiple-line Lidar. First, a new closed-form solution is proposed to obtain the initial calibration parameters. We compare our solution with the state-of-the-art SVD-based algorithm, and show the benefits of both the efficiency and stability. With the initial calibration parameters, the ICP-based calibration framework is used to register the point clouds which extracted from the camera and Lidar coordinate frames, respectively. Our method has been applied to two Lidar-camera systems: an HDL-64E Lidar-camera system, and a VLP-16 Lidar-camera system. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves promising performance and higher accuracy than two open-source methods.

Total Estimation from RGB Video: On-Line Camera Self-Calibration, Non-Rigid Shape and Motion

Antonio Agudo

Auto-TLDR; Joint Auto-Calibration, Pose and 3D Reconstruction of a Non-rigid Object from an uncalibrated RGB Image Sequence

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

In this paper we present a sequential approach to jointly retrieve camera auto-calibration, camera pose and the 3D reconstruction of a non-rigid object from an uncalibrated RGB image sequence, without assuming any prior information about the shape structure, nor the need for a calibration pattern, nor the use of training data at all. To this end, we propose a Bayesian filtering approach based on a sum-of-Gaussians filter composed of a bank of extended Kalman filters (EKF). For every EKF, we make use of dynamic models to estimate its state vector, which later will be Gaussianly combined to achieve a global solution. To deal with deformable objects, we incorporate a mechanical model solved by using the finite element method. Thanks to these ingredients, the resulting method is both efficient and robust to several artifacts such as missing and noisy observations as well as sudden camera motions, while being available for a wide variety of objects and materials, including isometric and elastic shape deformations. Experimental validation is proposed in real experiments, showing its strengths with respect to competing approaches.

Polarimetric Image Augmentation

Marc Blanchon, Fabrice Meriaudeau, Olivier Morel, Ralph Seulin, Desire Sidibe

Auto-TLDR; Polarimetric Augmentation for Deep Learning in Robotics Applications

Abstract Poster Similar

This paper deals with new augmentation methods for an unconventional imaging modality sensitive to the physics of the observed scene called polarimetry. In nature, polarized light is obtained by reﬂection or scattering. Robotics applications in urban environments are subject to many obstacles that can be specular and therefore provide polarized light. These areas are prone to segmentation errors using standard modalities but could be solved using information carried by the polarized light. Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNNs) have shown excellent segmentation results, but require a signiﬁcant amount of data to achieve best performances. The lack of data is usually overcomed by using augmentation methods. However, unlike RGB images, polarization images are not only scalar (intensity) images and standard augmentation techniques cannot be applied straightforwardly. We propose enhancing deep learning models through a regularized augmentation procedure applied to polarimetric data in order to characterize scenes more effectively under challenging conditions. We subsequently observe an average of 18.1% improvement in IoU between not augmented and regularized training procedures on real world data.

Edge-Aware Monocular Dense Depth Estimation with Morphology

Zhi Li, Xiaoyang Zhu, Haitao Yu, Qi Zhang, Yongshi Jiang

Auto-TLDR; Spatio-Temporally Smooth Dense Depth Maps Using Only a CPU

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

Dense depth maps play an important role in Computer Vision and AR (Augmented Reality). For CV applications, a dense depth map is the cornerstone of 3D reconstruction allowing real objects to be precisely displayed in the computer. And Dense depth maps can handle correct occlusion relationships between virtual content and real objects for better user experience in AR. However, the complicated computation limits the development of computing dense depth maps. We present a novel algorithm that produces low latency, spatio-temporally smooth dense depth maps using only a CPU. The depth maps exhibit sharp discontinuities at depth edges in low computational complexity ways. Our algorithm obtains the sparse SLAM reconstruction first, then extracts coarse depth edges from a down-sampled RGB image by morphology operations. Next, we thin the depth edges and align them with image edges. Finally, a Warm-Start initialization scheme and an improved optimization solver are adopted to accelerate convergence. We evaluate our proposal quantitatively and the result shows improvements on the accuracy of depth map with respect to other state-of-the-art and baseline techniques.

Map-Based Temporally Consistent Geolocalization through Learning Motion Trajectories

Bing Zha, Alper Yilmaz

Auto-TLDR; Exploiting Motion Trajectories for Geolocalization of Object on Topological Map using Recurrent Neural Network

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

In this paper, we propose a novel trajectory learning method that exploits motion trajectories on topological map using recurrent neural network for temporally consistent geolocalization of object. Inspired by human's ability to both be aware of distance and direction of self-motion in navigation, our trajectory learning method learns a pattern representation of trajectories encoded as a sequence of distances and turning angles to assist self-localization. We pose the learning process as a conditional sequence prediction problem in which each output locates the object on a traversable edge in a map. Considering the prediction sequence ought to be topologically connected in the graph-structured map, we adopt two different hypotheses generation and elimination strategies to eliminate disconnected sequence prediction. We demonstrate our approach on the KITTI stereo visual odometry dataset which is a city-scale environment. The key benefits of our approach to geolocalization are that 1) we take advantage of powerful sequence modeling ability of recurrent neural network and its robustness to noisy input, 2) only require a map in the form of a graph and 3) simply use an affordable sensor that generates motion trajectory. The experiments show that the motion trajectories can be learned by training an recurrent neural network, and temporally consistent geolocation can be predicted with both of the proposed strategies.

Surface Material Dataset for Robotics Applications (SMDRA): A Dataset with Friction Coefficient and RGB-D for Surface Segmentation

Donghun Noh, Hyunwoo Nam, Min Sung Ahn, Hosik Chae, Sangjoon Lee, Kyle Gillespie, Dennis Hong

Auto-TLDR; A Surface Material Dataset for Robotics Applications

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

In this paper, we introduce the Surface Material Dataset for Robotics Applications (SMDRA), a collection of RGB color image, depth data, and pixel-wise friction coefficient data of 10 different materials for computer vision research specifically with robotics applications in mind that require physical contact between the robot and its environment such as robotic manipulators or walking robots. These selected surface materials are both easily accessible around our daily lives and cover a wide range of friction coefficients. Our dataset is unique in that while there is an abundance of RGB-D data due to the popularization of imaging sensors, additional pixel-wise aligned data of a different modality are not readily available. The depth data is collected by an active stereo camera which has shown promise on a variety of different robotic applications. In addition, this dataset is greatly expanded with friction coefficient data. Similarly to humans, this additional information can be helpful in ensuing proper decision making in tasks ranging from grasping orientation and strength to path determination in an unstructured environment. A newly developed friction measuring device was used to obtain this data. We verify that existing Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architectures, the Fully Convolutional Network (FCN) and U-Net, can be trained on the SMDRA. This result demonstrates that the SMDRA can be utilized to train a neural network model for segmentation and these different modes are not just additional information, but valuable modes that researchers can incorporate and exploit when applying computer vision algorithms on robotic platforms.

Weight Estimation from an RGB-D Camera in Top-View Configuration

Marco Mameli, Marina Paolanti, Nicola Conci, Filippo Tessaro, Emanuele Frontoni, Primo Zingaretti

Auto-TLDR; Top-View Weight Estimation using Deep Neural Networks

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

The development of so-called soft-biometrics aims at providing information related to the physical and behavioural characteristics of a person. This paper focuses on bodyweight estimation based on the observation from a top-view RGB-D camera. In fact, the capability to estimate the weight of a person can be of help in many different applications, from health-related scenarios to business intelligence and retail analytics. To deal with this issue, a TVWE (Top-View Weight Estimation) framework is proposed with the aim of predicting the weight. The approach relies on the adoption of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) that have been trained on depth data. Each network has also been modified in its top section to replace classification with prediction inference. The performance of five state-of-art DNNs has been compared, namely VGG16, ResNet, Inception, DenseNet and Efficient-Net. In addition, a convolutional auto-encoder has also been included for completeness. Considering the limited literature in this domain, the TVWE framework has been evaluated on a new publicly available dataset: “VRAI Weight estimation Dataset”, which also collects, for each subject, labels related to weight, gender, and height. The experimental results have demonstrated that the proposed methods are suitable for this task, bringing different and significant insights for the application of the solution in different domains.

A Plane-Based Approach for Indoor Point Clouds Registration

Ketty Favre, Muriel Pressigout, Luce Morin, Eric Marchand

Auto-TLDR; A plane-based registration approach for indoor environments based on LiDAR data

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

Iterative Closest Point (ICP) is one of the mostly used algorithms for 3D point clouds registration. This classical approach can be impacted by the large number of points contained in a point cloud. Planar structures, which are less numerous than points, can be used in well-structured man-made environment. In this paper we propose a registration method inspired by the ICP algorithm in a plane-based registration approach for indoor environments. This method is based solely on data acquired with a LiDAR sensor. A new metric based on plane characteristics is introduced to find the best plane correspondences. The optimal transformation is estimated through a two-step minimization approach, successively performing robust plane-to-plane minimization and non-linear robust point-to-plane registration. Experiments on the Autonomous Systems Lab (ASL) dataset show that the proposed method enables to successfully register 100% of the scans from the three indoor sequences. Experiments also show that the proposed method is more robust in large motion scenarios than other state-of-the-art algorithms.

Vehicle Lane Merge Visual Benchmark

Kai Cordes, Hellward Broszio

Auto-TLDR; A Benchmark for Automated Cooperative Maneuvering Using Multi-view Video Streams and Ground Truth Vehicle Description

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

Automated driving is regarded as the most promising technology for improving road safety in the future. In this context, connected vehicles have an important role regarding their ability to perform cooperative maneuvers for challenging traffic situations. We propose a benchmark for automated cooperative maneuvers. The targeted cooperative maneuver is the vehicle lane merge where a vehicle on the acceleration lane merges into the traffic of a motorway. The benchmark enables the evaluation of vehicle localization approaches as well as the study of cooperative maneuvers. It consists of temporally synchronized multi-view video streams, highly accurate camera calibration, and ground truth vehicle descriptions, including position, heading, speed, and shape. For benchmark generation, the lane merge maneuver is performed by human drivers on a test track, resulting in 120 lane merge data sets with various traffic situations and video recording conditions.

Exploring Severe Occlusion: Multi-Person 3D Pose Estimation with Gated Convolution

Renshu Gu, Gaoang Wang, Jenq-Neng Hwang

Auto-TLDR; 3D Human Pose Estimation for Multi-Human Videos with Occlusion

Abstract Slides Similar

3D human pose estimation (HPE) is crucial in human behavior analysis, augmented reality/virtual reality (AR/VR) applications, and self-driving industry. Videos that contain multiple potentially occluded people captured from freely moving monocular cameras are very common in real-world scenarios, while 3D HPE for such scenarios is quite challenging, partially because there is a lack of such data with accurate 3D ground truth labels in existing datasets. In this paper, we propose a temporal regression network with a gated convolution module to transform 2D joints to 3D and recover the missing occluded joints in the meantime. A simple yet effective localization approach is further conducted to transform the normalized pose to the global trajectory. To verify the effectiveness of our approach, we also collect a new moving camera multi-human (MMHuman) dataset that includes multiple people with heavy occlusion captured by moving cameras. The 3D ground truth joints are provided by accurate motion capture (MoCap) system. From the experiments on static-camera based Human3.6M data and our own collected moving-camera based data, we show that our proposed method outperforms most state-of-the-art 2D-to-3D pose estimation methods, especially for the scenarios with heavy occlusions.

OmniFlowNet: A Perspective Neural Network Adaptation for Optical Flow Estimation in Omnidirectional Images

Charles-Olivier Artizzu, Haozhou Zhang, Guillaume Allibert, Cédric Demonceaux

Auto-TLDR; OmniFlowNet: A Convolutional Neural Network for Omnidirectional Optical Flow Estimation

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

Spherical cameras and the latest image processing techniques open up new horizons. In particular, methods based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) now give excellent results for optical flow estimation on perspective images. However, these approaches are highly dependent on their architectures and training datasets. This paper proposes to benefit from years of improvement in perspective images optical flow estimation and to apply it to omnidirectional ones without training on new datasets. Our network, OmniFlowNet, is built on a CNN specialized in perspective images. Its convolution operation is adapted to be consistent with the equirectangular projection. Tested on spherical datasets created with Blender and several equirectangular videos realized from real indoor and outdoor scenes, OmniFlowNet shows better performance than its original network.

IPT: A Dataset for Identity Preserved Tracking in Closed Domains

Thomas Heitzinger, Martin Kampel

Auto-TLDR; Identity Preserved Tracking Using Depth Data for Privacy and Privacy

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

We present a public dataset for Identity Preserved Tracking (IPT) consisting of sequences of depth data recorded using an Orbbec Astra depth sensor. The dataset features sequences in ten different locations with a high amount of background variation and is designed to be applicable to a wide range of tasks. Its labeling is versatile, allowing for tracking in either 3d space or image coordinates. Next to frame-by-frame 3d and inferred bounding box labeling we provide supplementary annotation of camera poses and room layouts, split in multiple semantically distinct categories. Intended use-cases are applications where both a high level understanding of scene understanding and privacy are central points of consideration, such as active and assisted living (AAL), security and industrial safety. Compared to similar public datasets IPT distinguishes itself with its sequential data format, 3d instance labeling and room layout annotation. We present baseline object detection results in image coordinates using a YOLOv3 network architecture and implement a background model suitable for online tracking applications to increase detection accuracy. Additionally we propose a novel volumetric non-maximum suppression (V-NMS) approach, taking advantage of known room geometry. Last we provide baseline person tracking results utilizing Multiple Object Tracking Challenge (MOTChallenge) evaluation metrics of the CVPR19 benchmark.

Photometric Stereo with Twin-Fisheye Cameras

Jordan Caracotte, Fabio Morbidi, El Mustapha Mouaddib

Auto-TLDR; Photometric stereo problem for low-cost 360-degree cameras

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

In this paper, we introduce and solve, for the first time, the photometric stereo problem for low-cost 360-degree cameras. In particular, we present a spherical image irradiance equation which is adapted to twin-fisheye cameras, and an original algorithm for the estimation of light directions based on the specular highlights observed on mirror balls. Extensive experiments with synthetic and real-world images captured by a Ricoh Theta V camera, demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed 3D reconstruction pipeline. To foster reproducible research, the image dataset and code developed for this paper are made publicly available at the address: https://home.mis.u-picardie.fr/~fabio/PhotoSphere.html

Calibration and Absolute Pose Estimation of Trinocular Linear Camera Array for Smart City Applications

Martin Ahrnbom, Mikael Nilsson, Håkan Ardö, Kalle Åström, Oksana Yastremska-Kravchenko, Aliaksei Laureshyn

Auto-TLDR; Trinocular Linear Camera Array Calibration for Traffic Surveillance Applications

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

A method for calibrating a Trinocular Linear Camera Array (TLCA) for traffic surveillance applications, such as towards smart cities, is presented. A TLCA-specific parametrization guarantees that the calibration finds a model where all the cameras are on a straight line. The method uses both a chequerboard close to the camera, as well as measured 3D points far from the camera: points measured in world coordinates, as well as their corresponding 2D points found manually in the images. Superior calibration accuracy can be obtained compared to standard methods using only a single data source, largely due to the use of chequerboards, while the line constraint in the parametrization allows for joint rectification. The improved triangulation accuracy, from 8-12 cm to around 6 cm when calibrating with 30-50 points in our experiment, allowing better road user analysis. The method is demonstrated by a proof-of-concept application where a point cloud is generated from multiple disparity maps, visualizing road user detections in 3D.

Light3DPose: Real-Time Multi-Person 3D Pose Estimation from Multiple Views

Alessio Elmi, Davide Mazzini, Pietro Tortella

Auto-TLDR; 3D Pose Estimation of Multiple People from a Few calibrated Camera Views using Deep Learning

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

We present an approach to perform 3D pose estimation of multiple people from a few calibrated camera views. Our architecture, leveraging the recently proposed unprojection layer, aggregates feature-maps from a 2D pose estimator backbone into a comprehensive representation of the 3D scene. Such intermediate representation is then elaborated by a fully-convolutional volumetric network and a decoding stage to extract 3D skeletons with sub-voxel accuracy. Our method achieves state of the art MPJPE on the CMU Panoptic dataset using a few unseen views and obtains competitive results even with a single input view. We also assess the transfer learning capabilities of the model by testing it against the publicly available Shelf dataset obtaining good performance metrics. The proposed method is inherently efficient: as a pure bottom-up approach, it is computationally independent of the number of people in the scene. Furthermore, even though the computational burden of the 2D part scales linearly with the number of input views, the overall architecture is able to exploit a very lightweight 2D backbone which is orders of magnitude faster than the volumetric counterpart, resulting in fast inference time. The system can run at 6 FPS, processing up to 10 camera views on a single 1080Ti GPU.

Object-Oriented Map Exploration and Construction Based on Auxiliary Task Aided DRL

Junzhe Xu, Jianhua Zhang, Shengyong Chen, Honghai Liu

Auto-TLDR; Auxiliary Task Aided Deep Reinforcement Learning for Environment Exploration by Autonomous Robots

Abstract Similar

Environment exploration by autonomous robots through deep reinforcement learning (DRL) based methods has attracted more and more attention. However, existing methods usually focus on robot navigation to single or multiple fixed goals, while ignoring the perception and construction of external environments. In this paper, we propose a novel environment exploration task based on DRL, which requires a robot fast and completely perceives all objects of interest, and reconstructs their poses in a global environment map, as much as the robot can do. To this end, we design an auxiliary task aided DRL model, which is integrated with the auxiliary object detection and 6-DoF pose estimation components. The outcome of auxiliary tasks can improve the learning speed and robustness of DRL, as well as the accuracy of object pose estimation. Comprehensive experimental results on the indoor simulation platform AI2-THOR have shown the effectiveness and robustness of our method.

Loop-closure detection by LiDAR scan re-identification

Jukka Peltomäki, Xingyang Ni, Jussi Puura, Joni-Kristian Kamarainen, Heikki Juhani Huttunen

Auto-TLDR; Loop-Closing Detection from LiDAR Scans Using Convolutional Neural Networks

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

In this work, loop-closure detection from LiDAR scans is defined as an image re-identification problem. Re-identification is performed by computing Euclidean distances of a query scan to a gallery set of previous scans. The distances are computed in a feature embedding space where the scans are mapped by a convolutional neural network (CNN). The network is trained using the triplet loss training strategy. In our experiments we compare different backbone networks, variants of the triplet loss and generic and LiDAR specific data augmentation techniques. With a realistic indoor dataset the best architecture obtains the mean average precision (mAP) above 90%.

Camera Calibration Using Parallel Line Segments

Gaku Nakano

Auto-TLDR; Closed-Form Calibration of Surveillance Cameras using Parallel 3D Line Segment Projections

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

This paper proposes a camera calibration method suitable for surveillance cameras using the image projection of parallel 3D line segments of the same length. We assume that vertical line segments are perpendicular to the ground plane and their bottom end-points are on the ground plane. Under this assumption, the camera parameters can be directly solved by at least two line segments without estimating vanishing points. Extending the minimal solution, we derive a closed-form solution to the least squares case with more than two line segments. Lens distortion is jointly optimized in bundle adjustment. Synthetic data evaluation shows that the best depression angle of a camera is around 50 degrees. In real data evaluation, we use body joints of pedestrians as vertical line segments. The experimental results on publicly available datasets show that the proposed method with a human pose detector can correctly calibrate wide-angle cameras including radial distortion.

Dynamic Resource-Aware Corner Detection for Bio-Inspired Vision Sensors

Sherif Abdelmonem Sayed Mohamed, Jawad Yasin, Mohammad-Hashem Haghbayan, Antonio Miele, Jukka Veikko Heikkonen, Hannu Tenhunen, Juha Plosila

Auto-TLDR; Three Layer Filtering-Harris Algorithm for Event-based Cameras in Real-Time

Abstract Slides Similar

Event-based cameras are vision devices that transmit only brightness changes with low latency and ultra-low power consumption. Such characteristics make event-based cameras attractive in the field of localization and object tracking in resource-constrained systems. Since the number of generated events in such cameras is huge, the selection and filtering of the incoming events are beneficial from both increasing the accuracy of the features and reducing the computational load. In this paper, we present an algorithm to detect asynchronous corners form a stream of events in real-time on embedded systems. The algorithm is called the Three Layer Filtering-Harris or TLF-Harris algorithm. The algorithm is based on an events' filtering strategy whose purpose is 1) to increase the accuracy by deliberately eliminating some incoming events, i.e., noise and 2) to improve the real-time performance of the system, i.e., preserving a constant throughput in terms of input events per second, by discarding unnecessary events with a limited accuracy loss. An approximation of the Harris algorithm, in turn, is used to exploit its high-quality detection capability with a low-complexity implementation to enable seamless real-time performance on embedded computing platforms. The proposed algorithm is capable of selecting the best corner candidate among neighbors and achieves an average execution time savings of 59 % compared with the conventional Harris score. Moreover, our approach outperforms the competing methods, such as eFAST, eHarris, and FA-Harris, in terms of real-time performance, and surpasses Arc* in terms of accuracy.

Motion Segmentation with Pairwise Matches and Unknown Number of Motions

Federica Arrigoni, Tomas Pajdla, Luca Magri

Auto-TLDR; Motion Segmentation using Multi-Modelfitting andpermutation synchronization

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

In this paper we address motion segmentation, that is the problem of clustering points in multiple images according to a number of moving objects. Two-frame correspondences are assumed as input without prior knowledge about trajectories. Our method is based on principles from ''multi-model fitting'' and ''permutation synchronization'', and - differently from previous techniques working under the same assumptions - it can handle an unknown number of motions. The proposed approach is validated on standard datasets, showing that it can correctly estimate the number of motions while maintaining comparable or better accuracy than the state of the art.

Effective Deployment of CNNs for 3DoF Pose Estimation and Grasping in Industrial Settings

Daniele De Gregorio, Riccardo Zanella, Gianluca Palli, Luigi Di Stefano

Auto-TLDR; Automated Deep Learning for Robotic Grasping Applications

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

In this paper we investigate how to effectively deploy deep learning in practical industrial settings, such as robotic grasping applications. When a deep-learning based solution is proposed, usually lacks of any simple method to generate the training data. In the industrial field, where automation is the main goal, not bridging this gap is one of the main reasons why deep learning is not as widespread as it is in the academic world. For this reason, in this work we developed a system composed by a 3-DoF Pose Estimator based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and an effective procedure to gather massive amounts of training images in the field with minimal human intervention. By automating the labeling stage, we also obtain very robust systems suitable for production-level usage. An open source implementation of our solution is provided, alongside with the dataset used for the experimental evaluation.

HPERL: 3D Human Pose Estimastion from RGB and LiDAR

Michael Fürst, Shriya T.P. Gupta, René Schuster, Oliver Wasenmüler, Didier Stricker

Auto-TLDR; 3D Human Pose Estimation Using RGB and LiDAR Using Weakly-Supervised Approach

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

In-the-wild human pose estimation has a huge potential for various fields, ranging from animation and action recognition to intention recognition and prediction for autonomous driving. The current state-of-the-art is focused only on RGB and RGB-D approaches for predicting the 3D human pose. However, not using precise LiDAR depth information limits the performance and leads to very inaccurate absolute pose estimation. With LiDAR sensors becoming more affordable and common on robots and autonomous vehicle setups, we propose an end-to-end architecture using RGB and LiDAR to predict the absolute 3D human pose with unprecedented precision. Additionally, we introduce a weakly-supervised approach to generate 3D predictions using 2D pose annotations from PedX. This allows for many new opportunities in the field of 3D human pose estimation.

Multiple Future Prediction Leveraging Synthetic Trajectories

Lorenzo Berlincioni, Federico Becattini, Lorenzo Seidenari, Alberto Del Bimbo

Auto-TLDR; Synthetic Trajectory Prediction using Markov Chains

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

Trajectory prediction is an important task, especially in autonomous driving. The ability to forecast the position of other moving agents can yield to an effective planning, ensuring safety for the autonomous vehicle as well for the observed entities. In this work we propose a data driven approach based on Markov Chains to generate synthetic trajectories, which are useful for training a multiple future trajectory predictor. The advantages are twofold: on the one hand synthetic samples can be used to augment existing datasets and train more effective predictors; on the other hand, it allows to generate samples with multiple ground truths, corresponding to diverse equally likely outcomes of the observed trajectory. We define a trajectory prediction model and a loss that explicitly address the multimodality of the problem and we show that combining synthetic and real data leads to prediction improvements, obtaining state of the art results.

Movement-Induced Priors for Deep Stereo

Yuxin Hou, Muhammad Kamran Janjua, Juho Kannala, Arno Solin

Auto-TLDR; Fusing Stereo Disparity Estimation with Movement-induced Prior Information

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

We propose a method for fusing stereo disparity estimation with movement-induced prior information. Instead of independent inference frame-by-frame, we formulate the problem as a non-parametric learning task in terms of a temporal Gaussian process prior with a movement-driven kernel for inter-frame reasoning. We present a hierarchy of three Gaussian process kernels depending on the availability of motion information, where our main focus is on a new gyroscope-driven kernel for handheld devices with low-quality MEMS sensors, thus also relaxing the requirement of having full 6D camera poses available. We show how our method can be combined with two state-of-the-art deep stereo methods. The method either work in a plug-and-play fashion with pre-trained deep stereo networks, or further improved by jointly training the kernels together with encoder--decoder architectures, leading to consistent improvement.

Deep Next-Best-View Planner for Cross-Season Visual Route Classification

Kurauchi Kanya, Kanji Tanaka

Auto-TLDR; Active Visual Place Recognition using Deep Convolutional Neural Network

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

This paper addresses the problem of active visual place recognition (VPR) from a novel perspective of long-term autonomy. In our approach, a next-best-view (NBV) planner plans an optimal action-observation-sequence to maximize the expected cost-performance for a visual route classification task. A difficulty arises from the fact that the NBV planner is trained and tested in different domains (times of day, weather conditions, and seasons). Existing NBV methods may be confused and deteriorated by the domain-shifts, and require significant efforts for adapting them to a new domain. We address this issue by a novel deep convolutional neural network (DNN) -based NBV planner that does not require the adaptation. Our main contributions in this paper are summarized as follows: (1) We present a novel domain-invariant NBV planner that is specifically tailored for DNN-based VPR. (2) We formulate the active VPR as a POMDP problem and present a feasible solution to address the inherent intractability. Specifically, the probability distribution vector (PDV) output by the available DNN is used as a domain-invariant observation model without the need to retrain it. (3) We verify efficacy of the proposed approach through challenging cross-season VPR experiments, where it is confirmed that the proposed approach clearly outperforms the previous single-view-based or multi-view-based VPR in terms of VPR accuracy and/or action-observation-cost.

Partially Supervised Multi-Task Network for Single-View Dietary Assessment

Ya Lu, Thomai Stathopoulou, Stavroula Mougiakakou

Auto-TLDR; Food Volume Estimation from a Single Food Image via Geometric Understanding and Semantic Prediction

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

Food volume estimation is an essential step in the pipeline of dietary assessment and demands the precise depth estimation of the food surface and table plane. Existing methods based on computer vision require either multi-image input or additional depth maps, reducing convenience of implementation and practical significance. Despite the recent advances in unsupervised depth estimation from a single image, the achieved performance in the case of large texture-less areas needs to be improved. In this paper, we propose a network architecture that jointly performs geometric understanding (i.e., depth prediction and 3D plane estimation) and semantic prediction on a single food image, enabling a robust and accurate food volume estimation regardless of the texture characteristics of the target plane. For the training of the network, only monocular videos with semantic ground truth are required, while the depth map and 3D plane ground truth are no longer needed. Experimental results on two separate food image databases demonstrate that our method performs robustly on texture-less scenarios and is superior to unsupervised networks and structure from motion based approaches, while it achieves comparable performance to fully-supervised methods.

Derivation of Geometrically and Semantically Annotated UAV Datasets at Large Scales from 3D City Models

Sidi Wu, Lukas Liebel, Marco Körner

Auto-TLDR; Large-Scale Dataset of Synthetic UAV Imagery for Geometric and Semantic Annotation

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

While in high demand for the development of deep learning approaches, extensive datasets of annotated UAV imagery are still scarce today. Manual annotation, however, is time-consuming and, thus, has limited the potential for creating large-scale datasets. We tackle this challenge by presenting a procedure for the automatic creation of simulated UAV image sequences in urban areas and pixel-level annotations from publicly available data sources. We synthesize photo-realistic UAV imagery from Goole Earth Studio and derive annotations from an open CityGML model that not only provides geometric but also semantic information. The first dataset we exemplarily created using our approach contains 144000 images of Berlin, Germany, with four types of annotations, namely semantic labels as well as depth, surface normals, and edge maps. In the future, a complete pipeline regarding all the technical problems will be provided, together with more accurate models to refine some of the empirical settings currently, to automatically generate a large-scale dataset with reliable ground-truth annotations over the whole city of Berlin. The dataset, as well as the source code, will be published by then. Different methods will also be facilitated to test the usability of the dataset. We believe our dataset can be used for, and not limited to, tasks like pose estimation, geo-localization, monocular depth estimation, edge detection, building/surface classification, and plane segmentation. A potential research pipeline for geo-localization based on the synthetic dataset is provided.

Two-Stage Adaptive Object Scene Flow Using Hybrid CNN-CRF Model

Congcong Li, Haoyu Ma, Qingmin Liao

Auto-TLDR; Adaptive object scene flow estimation using a hybrid CNN-CRF model and adaptive iteration

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

Scene flow estimation based on stereo sequences is a comprehensive task relevant to disparity and optical flow. Some existing methods are time-consuming and often fail in the presence of reflective surfaces. In this paper, we propose a two-stage adaptive object scene flow estimation method using a hybrid CNN-CRF model (ACOSF), which benefits from high-quality features and the structured modelling capability. Meanwhile, in order to balance the computational efficiency and accuracy, we employ adaptive iteration for energy function optimization, which is flexible and efficient for various scenes. Besides, we utilize high-quality pixel selection to reduce the computation time with only a slight decrease in accuracy. Our method achieves competitive results with the state-of-the-art, which ranks second on the challenging KITTI 2015 scene flow benchmark.

Improving Image Matching with Varied Illumination

Sarah Braeger, Hassan Foroosh

Auto-TLDR; Optimizing Feature Matching for Stereo Image Pairs by Stereo Illumination

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

We present a method to maximize feature matching performance across stereo image pairs by varying illumination. We perform matching between views per lighting condition, finding unique SIFT correspondences for each condition. These feature matches are then collected together into a single set, selecting those features which present the highest quality match. Instead of capturing each view under each illumination, we approximate lighting changes with a pretrained relighting convo- lutional neural network which only requires each view captured under a single specified lighting condition. We then collect the best of these feature matches over all lighting conditions offered by the relighting network. We further present an optimization to limit the number of lighting conditions evaluated to gain a specified number of matches. Our method is evaluated on a set of indoor scenes excluded from training the network with comparison to features extracted from pretrained VGG16. Our method offers an average 5.5× improvement in number of correct matches while retaining similar precision than by the original lit image pair per scene alone.

On Embodied Visual Navigation in Real Environments through Habitat

Marco Rosano, Antonino Furnari, Luigi Gulino, Giovanni Maria Farinella

Auto-TLDR; Learning Navigation Policies on Real World Observations using Real World Images and Sensor and Actuation Noise

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

Visual navigation models based on deep learning can learn effective policies when trained on large amounts of visual observations through reinforcement learning. Unfortunately, collecting the required experience deploying a robotic platform in the real world is expensive and time-consuming. To deal with this limitation, several simulation platforms have been proposed in order to train visual navigation policies on virtual environments efficiently. Despite the advantages they offer, simulators present a limited realism in terms of appearance and physical dynamics, leading to navigation policies that do not generalize in the real world. In this paper, we propose a tool based on the Habitat simulator which exploits real world images of the environment, together with sensor and actuator noise models, to produce more realistic navigation episodes. We perform a range of experiments using virtual, real and images transformed with a simple domain adaptation approach. We also assess the impact of sensor and actuation noise on the navigation performance and investigate whether they allow to learn more robust navigation policies. We show that our tool can effectively help to train and evaluate navigation policies on real world observations without running navigation episodes in the real world.

RefiNet: 3D Human Pose Refinement with Depth Maps

Andrea D'Eusanio, Stefano Pini, Guido Borghi, Roberto Vezzani, Rita Cucchiara

Auto-TLDR; RefiNet: A Multi-stage Framework for 3D Human Pose Estimation

Abstract Slides Similar

Human Pose Estimation is a fundamental task for many applications in the Computer Vision community and it has been widely investigated in the 2D domain, i.e. intensity images. Therefore, most of the available methods for this task are mainly based on 2D Convolutional Neural Networks and huge manually-annotated RGB datasets, achieving stunning results. In this paper, we propose RefiNet, a multi-stage framework that regresses an extremely-precise 3D human pose estimation from a given 2D pose and a depth map. The framework consists of three different modules, each one specialized in a particular refinement and data representation, i.e. depth patches, 3D skeleton and point clouds. Moreover, we collect a new dataset, namely Baracca, acquired with RGB, depth and thermal cameras and specifically created for the automotive context. Experimental results confirm the quality of the refinement procedure that largely improves the human pose estimations of off-the-shelf 2D methods.

Can You Trust Your Pose? Confidence Estimation in Visual Localization

Luca Ferranti, Xiaotian Li, Jani Boutellier, Juho Kannala

Auto-TLDR; Pose Confidence Estimation in Large-Scale Environments: A Light-weight Approach to Improving Pose Estimation Pipeline

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

Camera pose estimation in large-scale environments is still an open question and, despite recent promising results, it may still fail in some situations. The research so far has focused on improving subcomponents of estimation pipelines, to achieve more accurate poses. However, there is no guarantee for the result to be correct, even though the correctness of pose estimation is critically important in several visual localization applications, such as in autonomous navigation. In this paper we bring to attention a novel research question, pose confidence estimation, where we aim at quantifying how reliable the visually estimated pose is. We develop a novel confidence measure to fulfill this task and show that it can be flexibly applied to different datasets, indoor or outdoor, and for various visual localization pipelines. We also show that the proposed techniques can be used to accomplish a secondary goal: improving the accuracy of existing pose estimation pipelines. Finally, the proposed approach is computationally light-weight and adds only a negligible increase to the computational effort of pose estimation.

Mobile Augmented Reality: Fast, Precise, and Smooth Planar Object Tracking

Dmitrii Matveichev, Daw-Tung Lin

Auto-TLDR; Planar Object Tracking with Sparse Optical Flow Tracking and Descriptor Matching

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

We propose an innovative method for combining sparse optical flow tracking and descriptor matching algorithms. The proposed approach solves the following problems that are inherent to keypoint-based and optical flow based tracking algorithms: spatial jitter, extreme scale transformation, extreme perspective transformation, degradation in the number of tracking points, and drifting of tracking points. Our algorithm provides smooth object-position tracking under six degrees of freedom transformations with a small computational cost for providing a high-quality real-time AR experience on mobile platforms. We experimentally demonstrate that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art tracking algorithms while offering faster computational time. A mobile augmented reality (AR) application, which is developed using our approach, delivers planar object tracking with 30 FPS on modern mobile phones for a camera resolution of 1280$\times$720. Finally, we compare the performance of our AR application with that of the Vuforia-based AR application on the same planar objects database. The test results show that our AR application delivers better AR experience than Vuforia in terms of smooth transition of object-pose between video frames.

SAILenv: Learning in Virtual Visual Environments Made Simple

Enrico Meloni, Luca Pasqualini, Matteo Tiezzi, Marco Gori, Stefano Melacci

Auto-TLDR; SAILenv: A Simple and Customized Platform for Visual Recognition in Virtual 3D Environment

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

Recently, researchers in Machine Learning algorithms, Computer Vision scientists, engineers and others, showed a growing interest in 3D simulators as a mean to artificially create experimental settings that are very close to those in the real world. However, most of the existing platforms to interface algorithms with 3D environments are often designed to setup navigation-related experiments, to study physical interactions, or to handle ad-hoc cases that are not thought to be customized, sometimes lacking a strong photorealistic appearance and an easy-to-use software interface. In this paper, we present a novel platform, SAILenv, that is specifically designed to be simple and customizable, and that allows researchers to experiment visual recognition in virtual 3D scenes. A few lines of code are needed to interface every algorithm with the virtual world, and non-3D-graphics experts can easily customize the 3D environment itself, exploiting a collection of photorealistic objects. Our framework yields pixel-level semantic and instance labeling, depth, and, to the best of our knowledge, it is the only one that provides motion-related information directly inherited from the 3D engine. The client-server communication operates at a low level, avoiding the overhead of HTTP-based data exchanges. We perform experiments using a state-of-the-art object detector trained on real-world images, showing that it is able to recognize the photorealistic 3D objects of our environment. The computational burden of the optical flow compares favourably with the estimation performed using modern GPU-based convolutional networks or more classic implementations. We believe that the scientific community will benefit from the easiness and high-quality of our framework to evaluate newly proposed algorithms in their own customized realistic conditions.

Anomaly Detection, Localization and Classification for Railway Inspection

Riccardo Gasparini, Andrea D'Eusanio, Guido Borghi, Stefano Pini, Giuseppe Scaglione, Simone Calderara, Eugenio Fedeli, Rita Cucchiara

Auto-TLDR; Anomaly Detection and Localization using thermal images in the lowlight environment

Abstract Slides Similar

The ability to detect, localize and classify objects that are anomalies is a challenging task in the computer vision community. In this paper, we tackle these tasks developing a framework to automatically inspect the railway during the night. Specifically, it is able to predict the presence, the image coordinates and the class of obstacles. To deal with the lowlight environment, the framework is based on thermal images and consists of three different modules that address the problem of detecting anomalies, predicting their image coordinates and classifying them. Moreover, due to the absolute lack of publicly released datasets collected in the railway context for anomaly detection, we introduce a new multi-modal dataset, acquired from a rail drone, used to evaluate the proposed framework. Experimental results confirm the accuracy of the framework and its suitability, in terms of computational load, performance, and inference time, to be implemented on a self-powered inspection system.

Minimal Solvers for Indoor UAV Positioning

Marcus Valtonen Örnhag, Patrik Persson, Mårten Wadenbäck, Kalle Åström, Anders Heyden

Auto-TLDR; Relative Pose Solvers for Visual Indoor UAV Navigation

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

In this paper we consider a collection of relative pose problems which arise naturally in applications for visual indoor UAV navigation. We focus on cases where additional information from an onboard IMU is available and thus provides a partial extrinsic calibration through the gravitational vector. The solvers are designed for a partially calibrated camera, for a variety of realistic indoor scenarios, which makes it possible to navigate using images of the ground floor. Current state-of-the-art solvers use more general assumptions, such as using arbitrary planar structures; however, these solvers do not yield adequate reconstructions for real scenes, nor do they perform fast enough to be incorporated in real-time systems. We show that the proposed solvers enjoy better numerical stability, are faster, and require fewer point correspondences, compared to state-of-the-art solvers. These properties are vital components for robust navigation in real-time systems, and we demonstrate on both synthetic and real data that our method outperforms other methods, and yields superior motion estimation.

Do We Really Need Scene-Specific Pose Encoders?

Yoli Shavit, Ron Ferens

Auto-TLDR; Pose Regression Using Deep Convolutional Networks for Visual Similarity

Abstract Slides Similar

Visual pose regression models estimate the camera pose from a query image with a single forward pass. Current models learn pose encoding from an image using deep convolutional networks which are trained per scene. The resulting encoding is typically passed to a multi-layer perceptron in order to regress the pose. In this work, we propose that scene-specific pose encoders are not required for pose regression and that encodings trained for visual similarity can be used instead. In order to test our hypothesis, we take a shallow architecture of several fully connected layers and train it with pre-computed encodings from a generic image retrieval model. We find that these encodings are not only sufficient to regress the camera pose, but that, when provided to a branching fully connected architecture, a trained model can achieve competitive results and even surpass current state-of-the-art pose regressors in some cases. Moreover, we show that for outdoor localization, the proposed architecture is the only pose regressor, to date, consistently localizing in under 2 meters and 5 degrees.