Rotation estimation of known rigid objects is important for robotic applications such as dexterous manipulation. Most existing methods for rotation estimation use intermediate representations such as templates, global or local feature descriptors, or object coordinates, which require multiple steps in order to infer the object pose. We propose to directly regress a pose vector from raw point cloud segments using a convolutional neural network. Experimental results show that our method can potentially achieve competitive performance compared to a state-of-the-art method, while also showing more robustness against occlusion. Our method does not require any post processing such as refinement with the iterative closest point algorithm.
Depth information in deep learning systems can be represented with, e.g., voxel grids @cite_30 @cite_18 , truncated signed distance functions (TSDF) @cite_9 , or point clouds @cite_5 . Voxel grids are simple to generate and use. Because of their regular grid structure, voxel grids can be directly used as inputs to 3D CNNs. However, voxel grids are inefficient since they also have to explicitly represent empty space. They also suffer from discretization artifacts. TSDF tries to alleviate these problems by storing the shortest distance to the surface represented in each voxel. This allows a more faithful representation of the 3D information. In comparison to other depth data representations, a point cloud has a simple representation without redundancy, yet contains rich geometric information. Recently, PointNet @cite_5 has allowed to use raw point clouds directly as an input of a CNN.
@cite_30 @cite_9 @cite_18 @cite_5
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Truncated Signed Distance Fields (TSDFs) have become a popular tool in 3D reconstruction, as they allow building very high-resolution models of the environment in real-time on GPU. However, they have rarely been used for planning on robotic platforms, mostly due to high computational and memory requirements. We propose to reduce these requirements by using large voxel sizes, and extend the standard TSDF representation to be faster and better model the environment at these scales. We also propose a method to build Euclidean Signed Distance Fields (ESDFs), which are a common representation for planning, incrementally out of our TSDF representation. ESDFs provide Euclidean distance to the nearest obstacle at any point in the map, and also provide collision gradient information for use with optimization-based planners. We validate the reconstruction accuracy and real-time performance of our combined system on both new and standard datasets from stereo and RGB-D imagery. The complete system will be made available as an open-source library called voxblox. Generation of 3D data by deep neural network has been attracting increasing attention in the research community. The majority of extant works resort to regular representations such as volumetric grids or collection of images, however, these representations obscure the natural invariance of 3D shapes under geometric transformations, and also suffer from a number of other issues. In this paper we address the problem of 3D reconstruction from a single image, generating a straight-forward form of output &#x2013; point cloud coordinates. Along with this problem arises a unique and interesting issue, that the groundtruth shape for an input image may be ambiguous. Driven by this unorthordox output form and the inherent ambiguity in groundtruth, we design architecture, loss function and learning paradigm that are novel and effective. Our final solution is a conditional shape sampler, capable of predicting multiple plausible 3D point clouds from an input image. In experiments not only can our system outperform state-of-the-art methods on single image based 3D reconstruction benchmarks, but it also shows strong performance for 3D shape completion and promising ability in making multiple plausible predictions. Deep neural networks have enjoyed remarkable success for various vision tasks, however it remains challenging to apply CNNs to domains lacking a regular underlying structures such as 3D point clouds. Towards this we propose a novel convolutional architecture, termed SpiderCNN, to efficiently extract geometric features from point clouds. SpiderCNN is comprised of units called SpiderConv, which extend convolutional operations from regular grids to irregular point sets that can be embedded in ( R ^n ), by parametrizing a family of convolutional filters. We design the filter as a product of a simple step function that captures local geodesic information and a Taylor polynomial that ensures the expressiveness. SpiderCNN inherits the multi-scale hierarchical architecture from classical CNNs, which allows it to extract semantic deep features. Experiments on ModelNet40 demonstrate that SpiderCNN achieves state-of-the-art accuracy (92.4 ) on standard benchmarks, and shows competitive performance on segmentation task. 3D data such as point clouds and meshes are becoming more and more available. The goal of this paper is to obtain 3D object and scene classification and semantic segmentation. Because point clouds have irregular formats, most of the existing methods convert the 3D data into multiple 2D projection images or 3D voxel grids. These representations are suited as input of conventional CNNs but they either ignore the underlying 3D geometrical structure or are constrained by data sparsity and computational complexity. Therefore, recent methods encode the coordinates of each point cloud to certain high dimensional features to cover the 3D space. However, by their design, these models are not able to sufficiently capture the local patterns. In this paper, we propose a method that directly uses point clouds as input and exploits the implicit space partition of k-d tree structure to learn the local contextual information and aggregate features at different scales hierarchically. Extensive experiments on challenging benchmarks show that our proposed model properly captures the local patterns to provide discriminative point set features. For the task of 3D scene semantic segmentation, our method outperforms the state-of-the-art on the challenging Stanford Large-Scale 3D Indoor Spaces Dataset(S3DIS) by a large margin. Recent deep networks that directly handle points in a point set, e.g., PointNet, have been state-of-the-art for supervised semantic learning tasks on point clouds such as classification and segmentation. In this work, a novel end-to-end deep auto-encoder is proposed to address unsupervised learning challenges on point clouds. On the encoder side, a graph-based enhancement is enforced to promote local structures on top of PointNet. Then, a novel folding-based approach is proposed in the decoder, which folds a 2D grid onto the underlying 3D object surface of a point cloud. The proposed decoder only uses about 7 parameters of a decoder with fully-connected neural networks, yet leads to a more discriminative representation that achieves higher linear SVM classification accuracy than the benchmark. In addition, the proposed decoder structure is shown, in theory, to be a generic architecture that is able to reconstruct an arbitrary point cloud from a 2D grid. Finally, this folding-based decoder is interpretable since the reconstruction could be viewed as a fine granular warping from the 2D grid to the point cloud surface. In this paper, we address semantic segmentation of road-objects from 3D LiDAR point clouds. In particular, we wish to detect and categorize instances of interest, such as cars, pedestrians and cyclists. We formulate this problem as a point- wise classification problem, and propose an end-to-end pipeline called SqueezeSeg based on convolutional neural networks (CNN): the CNN takes a transformed LiDAR point cloud as input and directly outputs a point-wise label map, which is then refined by a conditional random field (CRF) implemented as a recurrent layer. Instance-level labels are then obtained by conventional clustering algorithms. Our CNN model is trained on LiDAR point clouds from the KITTI dataset, and our point-wise segmentation labels are derived from 3D bounding boxes from KITTI. To obtain extra training data, we built a LiDAR simulator into Grand Theft Auto V (GTA-V), a popular video game, to synthesize large amounts of realistic training data. Our experiments show that SqueezeSeg achieves high accuracy with astonishingly fast and stable runtime (8.7 ms per frame), highly desirable for autonomous driving applications. Furthermore, additionally training on synthesized data boosts validation accuracy on real-world data. Our source code and synthesized data will be open-sourced. Building discriminative representations for 3D data has been an important task in computer graphics and computer vision research. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have shown to operate on 2D images with great success for a variety of tasks. Lifting convolution operators to 3D (3DCNNs) seems like a plausible and promising next step. Unfortunately, the computational complexity of 3D CNNs grows cubically with respect to voxel resolution. Moreover, since most 3D geometry representations are boundary based, occupied regions do not increase proportionately with the size of the discretization, resulting in wasted computation. In this work, we represent 3D spaces as volumetric fields, and propose a novel design that employs field probing filters to efficiently extract features from them. Each field probing filter is a set of probing points --- sensors that perceive the space. Our learning algorithm optimizes not only the weights associated with the probing points, but also their locations, which deforms the shape of the probing filters and adaptively distributes them in 3D space. The optimized probing points sense the 3D space "intelligently", rather than operating blindly over the entire domain. We show that field probing is significantly more efficient than 3DCNNs, while providing state-of-the-art performance, on classification tasks for 3D object recognition benchmark datasets. Convolutional neural network (CNN) has achieved the state-of-the-art performance in many different visual tasks. Learned from a large-scale training data set, CNN features are much more discriminative and accurate than the handcrafted features. Moreover, CNN features are also transferable among different domains. On the other hand, traditional dictionary-based features (such as BoW and spatial pyramid matching) contain much more local discriminative and structural information, which is implicitly embedded in the images. To further improve the performance, in this paper, we propose to combine CNN with dictionary-based models for scene recognition and visual domain adaptation (DA). Specifically, based on the well-tuned CNN models (e.g., AlexNet and VGG Net), two dictionary-based representations are further constructed, namely, mid-level local representation (MLR) and convolutional Fisher vector (CFV) representation. In MLR, an efficient two-stage clustering method, i.e., weighted spatial and feature space spectral clustering on the parts of a single image followed by clustering all representative parts of all images, is used to generate a class-mixture or a class-specific part dictionary. After that, the part dictionary is used to operate with the multiscale image inputs for generating mid-level representation. In CFV, a multiscale and scale-proportional Gaussian mixture model training strategy is utilized to generate Fisher vectors based on the last convolutional layer of CNN. By integrating the complementary information of MLR, CFV, and the CNN features of the fully connected layer, the state-of-the-art performance can be achieved on scene recognition and DA problems. An interested finding is that our proposed hybrid representation (from VGG net trained on ImageNet) is also complementary to GoogLeNet and or VGG-11 (trained on Place205) greatly. Many modern 3D reconstruction methods accumulate information volumetrically using truncated signed distance functions. While this usually imposes a regular grid with fixed voxel size, not all parts of a scene necessarily need to be represented at the same level of detail. For example, a flat table needs less detail than a highly structured keyboard on it. We introduce a novel representation for the volumetric 3D data that uses hash functions rather than trees for accessing individual blocks of the scene, but which still provides different resolution levels. We show that our data structure provides efficient access and manipulation functions that can be very well parallelised, and also describe an automatic way of choosing appropriate resolutions for different parts of the scene. We embed the novel representation in a system for simultaneous localization and mapping from RGB-D imagery and also investigate the implications of the irregular grid on interpolation routines. Finally, we evaluate our system in experiments, demonstrating state-of-the-art representation accuracy at typical frame-rates around 100 Hz, along with 40 memory savings. Building discriminative representations for 3D data has been an important task in computer graphics and computer vision research. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have shown to operate on 2D images with great success for a variety of tasks. Lifting convolution operators to 3D (3DCNNs) seems like a plausible and promising next step. Unfortunately, the computational complexity of 3D CNNs grows cubically with respect to voxel resolution. Moreover, since most 3D geometry representations are boundary based, occupied regions do not increase proportionately with the size of the discretization, resulting in wasted computation. In this work, we represent 3D spaces as volumetric fields, and propose a novel design that employs field probing filters to efficiently extract features from them. Each field probing filter is a set of probing points -- sensors that perceive the space. Our learning algorithm optimizes not only the weights associated with the probing points, but also their locations, which deforms the shape of the probing filters and adaptively distributes them in 3D space. The optimized probing points sense the 3D space "intelligently", rather than operating blindly over the entire domain. We show that field probing is significantly more efficient than 3DCNNs, while providing state-of-the-art performance, on classification tasks for 3D object recognition benchmark datasets. Unlike images which are represented in regular dense grids, 3D point clouds are irregular and unordered, hence applying convolution on them can be difficult. In this paper, we extend the dynamic filter to a new convolution operation, named PointConv. PointConv can be applied on point clouds to build deep convolutional networks. We treat convolution kernels as nonlinear functions of the local coordinates of 3D points comprised of weight and density functions. With respect to a given point, the weight functions are learned with multi-layer perceptron networks and density functions through kernel density estimation. The most important contribution of this work is a novel reformulation proposed for efficiently computing the weight functions, which allowed us to dramatically scale up the network and significantly improve its performance. The learned convolution kernel can be used to compute translation-invariant and permutation-invariant convolution on any point set in the 3D space. Besides, PointConv can also be used as deconvolution operators to propagate features from a subsampled point cloud back to its original resolution. Experiments on ModelNet40, ShapeNet, and ScanNet show that deep convolutional neural networks built on PointConv are able to achieve state-of-the-art on challenging semantic segmentation benchmarks on 3D point clouds. Besides, our experiments converting CIFAR-10 into a point cloud showed that networks built on PointConv can match the performance of convolutional networks in 2D images of a similar structure. Accurate detection of objects in 3D point clouds is a central problem in many applications, such as autonomous navigation, housekeeping robots, and augmented virtual reality. To interface a highly sparse LiDAR point cloud with a region proposal network (RPN), most existing efforts have focused on hand-crafted feature representations, for example, a bird's eye view projection. In this work, we remove the need of manual feature engineering for 3D point clouds and propose VoxelNet, a generic 3D detection network that unifies feature extraction and bounding box prediction into a single stage, end-to-end trainable deep network. Specifically, VoxelNet divides a point cloud into equally spaced 3D voxels and transforms a group of points within each voxel into a unified feature representation through the newly introduced voxel feature encoding (VFE) layer. In this way, the point cloud is encoded as a descriptive volumetric representation, which is then connected to a RPN to generate detections. Experiments on the KITTI car detection benchmark show that VoxelNet outperforms the state-of-the-art LiDAR based 3D detection methods by a large margin. Furthermore, our network learns an effective discriminative representation of objects with various geometries, leading to encouraging results in 3D detection of pedestrians and cyclists, based on only LiDAR. Accurate detection of objects in 3D point clouds is a central problem in many applications, such as autonomous navigation, housekeeping robots, and augmented virtual reality. To interface a highly sparse LiDAR point cloud with a region proposal network (RPN), most existing efforts have focused on hand-crafted feature representations, for example, a bird's eye view projection. In this work, we remove the need of manual feature engineering for 3D point clouds and propose VoxelNet, a generic 3D detection network that unifies feature extraction and bounding box prediction into a single stage, end-to-end trainable deep network. Specifically, VoxelNet divides a point cloud into equally spaced 3D voxels and transforms a group of points within each voxel into a unified feature representation through the newly introduced voxel feature encoding (VFE) layer. In this way, the point cloud is encoded as a descriptive volumetric representation, which is then connected to a RPN to generate detections. Experiments on the KITTI car detection benchmark show that VoxelNet outperforms the state-of-the-art LiDAR based 3D detection methods by a large margin. Furthermore, our network learns an effective discriminative representation of objects with various geometries, leading to encouraging results in 3D detection of pedestrians and cyclists, based on only LiDAR. We present a novel method to obtain fine-scale detail in 3D reconstructions generated with low-budget RGB-D cameras or other commodity scanning devices. As the depth data of these sensors is noisy, truncated signed distance fields are typically used to regularize out the noise, which unfortunately leads to over-smoothed results. In our approach, we leverage RGB data to refine these reconstructions through shading cues, as color input is typically of much higher resolution than the depth data. As a result, we obtain reconstructions with high geometric detail, far beyond the depth resolution of the camera itself. Our core contribution is shading-based refinement directly on the implicit surface representation, which is generated from globally-aligned RGB-D images. We formulate the inverse shading problem on the volumetric distance field, and present a novel objective function which jointly optimizes for fine-scale surface geometry and spatially-varying surface reflectance. In order to enable the efficient reconstruction of sub-millimeter detail, we store and process our surface using a sparse voxel hashing scheme which we augment by introducing a grid hierarchy. A tailored GPU-based Gauss-Newton solver enables us to refine large shape models to previously unseen resolution within only a few seconds. Robots that are operating for extended periods of time need to be able to deal with changes in their environment and represent them adequately in their maps. In this paper, we present a novel 3D reconstruction algorithm based on an extended Truncated Signed Distance Function (TSDF) that enables to continuously refine the static map while simultaneously obtaining 3D reconstructions of dynamic objects in the scene. This is a challenging problem because map updates happen incrementally and are often incomplete. Previous work typically performs change detection on point clouds, surfels or maps, which are not able to distinguish between unexplored and empty space. In contrast, our TSDF-based representation naturally contains this information and thus allows us to more robustly solve the scene differencing problem. We demonstrate the algorithms performance as part of a system for unsupervised object discovery and class recognition. We evaluated our algorithm on challenging datasets that we recorded over several days with RGB-D enabled tablets. To stimulate further research in this area, all of our datasets are publicly available3. Recent deep networks that directly handle points in a point set, e.g., PointNet, have been state-of-the-art for supervised learning tasks on point clouds such as classification and segmentation. In this work, a novel end-to-end deep auto-encoder is proposed to address unsupervised learning challenges on point clouds. On the encoder side, a graph-based enhancement is enforced to promote local structures on top of PointNet. Then, a novel folding-based decoder deforms a canonical 2D grid onto the underlying 3D object surface of a point cloud, achieving low reconstruction errors even for objects with delicate structures. The proposed decoder only uses about 7 parameters of a decoder with fully-connected neural networks, yet leads to a more discriminative representation that achieves higher linear SVM classification accuracy than the benchmark. In addition, the proposed decoder structure is shown, in theory, to be a generic architecture that is able to reconstruct an arbitrary point cloud from a 2D grid. Our code is available at http: www.merl.com research license#FoldingNet With deep learning becoming the dominant approach in computer vision, the use of representations extracted from Convolutional Neural Nets (CNNs) is quickly gaining ground on Fisher Vectors (FVs) as favoured state-of-the-art global image descriptors for image instance retrieval. While the good performance of CNNs for image classification are unambiguously recognised, which of the two has the upper hand in the image retrieval context is not entirely clear yet. In this work, we propose a comprehensive study that systematically evaluates FVs and CNNs for image retrieval. The first part compares the performances of FVs and CNNs on multiple publicly available data sets. We investigate a number of details specific to each method. For FVs, we compare sparse descriptors based on interest point detectors with dense single-scale and multi-scale variants. For CNNs, we focus on understanding the impact of depth, architecture and training data on retrieval results. Our study shows that no descriptor is systematically better than the other and that performance gains can usually be obtained by using both types together. The second part of the study focuses on the impact of geometrical transformations such as rotations and scale changes. FVs based on interest point detectors are intrinsically resilient to such transformations while CNNs do not have a built-in mechanism to ensure such invariance. We show that performance of CNNs can quickly degrade in presence of rotations while they are far less affected by changes in scale. We then propose a number of ways to incorporate the required invariances in the CNN pipeline. Overall, our work is intended as a reference guide offering practically useful and simply implementable guidelines to anyone looking for state-of-the-art global descriptors best suited to their specific image instance retrieval problem. Some existing CNN-based methods for single-view 3D object reconstruction represent a 3D object as either a 3D voxel occupancy grid or multiple depth-mask image pairs. However, these representations are inefficient since empty voxels or background pixels are wasteful. We propose a novel approach that addresses this limitation by replacing masks with “deformation-fields”. Given a single image at an arbitrary viewpoint, a CNN predicts multiple surfaces, each in a canonical location relative to the object. Each surface comprises a depth-map and corresponding deformation-field that ensures every pixel-depth pair in the depth-map lies on the object surface. These surfaces are then fused to form the full 3D shape. During training we use a combination of per-view loss and multi-view losses. The novel multi-view loss encourages the 3D points back-projected from a particular view to be consistent across views. Extensive experiments demonstrate the efficiency and efficacy of our method on single-view 3D object reconstruction. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have recently achieved remarkable successes in various image classification and understanding tasks. The deep features obtained at the top fully connected layer of the CNN (FC-features) exhibit rich global semantic information and are extremely effective in image classification. On the other hand, the convolutional features in the middle layers of the CNN also contain meaningful local information, but are not fully explored for image representation. In this paper, we propose a novel locally supervised deep hybrid model (LS-DHM) that effectively enhances and explores the convolutional features for scene recognition. First, we notice that the convolutional features capture local objects and fine structures of scene images, which yield important cues for discriminating ambiguous scenes, whereas these features are significantly eliminated in the highly compressed FC representation. Second, we propose a new local convolutional supervision layer to enhance the local structure of the image by directly propagating the label information to the convolutional layers. Third, we propose an efficient Fisher convolutional vector (FCV) that successfully rescues the orderless mid-level semantic information (e.g., objects and textures) of scene image. The FCV encodes the large-sized convolutional maps into a fixed-length mid-level representation, and is demonstrated to be strongly complementary to the high-level FC-features. Finally, both the FCV and FC-features are collaboratively employed in the LS-DHM representation, which achieves outstanding performance in our experiments. It obtains 83.75 and 67.56 accuracies, respectively, on the heavily benchmarked MIT Indoor67 and SUN397 data sets, advancing the state-of-the-art substantially. Recently, Convolutional Neural Networks have shown promising results for 3D geometry prediction. They can make predictions from very little input data such as a single color image. A major limitation of such approaches is that they only predict a coarse resolution voxel grid, which does not capture the surface of the objects well. We propose a general framework, called hierarchical surface prediction (HSP), which facilitates prediction of high resolution voxel grids. The main insight is that it is sufficient to predict high resolution voxels around the predicted surfaces. The exterior and interior of the objects can be represented with coarse resolution voxels. Our approach is not dependent on a specific input type. We show results for geometry prediction from color images, depth images and shape completion from partial voxel grids. Our analysis shows that our high resolution predictions are more accurate than low resolution predictions.