Topographic mapping in planetary environments relies on accurate 3D scan registration methods. However, most global registration algorithms relying on features such as FPFH and Harris-3D show poor alignment accuracy in these settings due to the poor structure of the Mars-like terrain and variable resolution, occluded, sparse range data that is hard to register without some a-priori knowledge of the environment. In this paper, we propose an alternative approach to 3D scan registration using the curvelet transform that performs multi-resolution geometric analysis to obtain a set of coefficients indexed by scale (coarsest to finest), angle and spatial position. Features are detected in the curvelet domain to take advantage of the directional selectivity of the transform. A descriptor is computed for each feature by calculating the 3D spatial histogram of the image gradients, and nearest neighbor based matching is used to calculate the feature correspondences. Correspondence rejection using Random Sample Consensus identifies inliers, and a locally optimal Singular Value Decomposition-based estimation of the rigid-body transformation aligns the laser scans given the re-projected correspondences in the metric space. Experimental results on a publicly available data-set of planetary analogue indoor facility, as well as simulated and real-world scans from Neptec Design Group's IVIGMS 3D laser rangefinder at the outdoor CSA Mars yard demonstrates improved performance over existing methods in the challenging sparse Mars-like terrain.
The Harris corner point detector initially proposed for 2D images @cite_13 has previously been extended for key-point detection on 3D surfaces @cite_3 @cite_43 where it makes use of surface normals instead of using image gradients. 3D normals calculated in noisy regions or around points at depth-discontinuities are frequently incorrect.
@cite_43 @cite_13 @cite_3
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The repeatability and efficiency of a corner detector determines how likely it is to be useful in a real-world application. The repeatability is important because the same scene viewed from different positions should yield features which correspond to the same real-world 3D locations. The efficiency is important because this determines whether the detector combined with further processing can operate at frame rate. Three advances are described in this paper. First, we present a new heuristic for feature detection and, using machine learning, we derive a feature detector from this which can fully process live PAL video using less than 5 percent of the available processing time. By comparison, most other detectors cannot even operate at frame rate (Harris detector 115 percent, SIFT 195 percent). Second, we generalize the detector, allowing it to be optimized for repeatability, with little loss of efficiency. Third, we carry out a rigorous comparison of corner detectors based on the above repeatability criterion applied to 3D scenes. We show that, despite being principally constructed for speed, on these stringent tests, our heuristic detector significantly outperforms existing feature detectors. Finally, the comparison demonstrates that using machine learning produces significant improvements in repeatability, yielding a detector that is both very fast and of very high quality. The paper gives a snapshot of the state of the art in affine covariant region detectors, and compares their performance on a set of test images under varying imaging conditions. Six types of detectors are included: detectors based on affine normalization around Harris (Mikolajczyk and Schmid, 2002; Schaffalitzky and Zisserman, 2002) and Hessian points (Mikolajczyk and Schmid, 2002), a detector of maximally stable extremal regions', proposed by (2002); an edge-based region detector (Tuytelaars and Van Gool, 1999) and a detector based on intensity extrema (Tuytelaars and Van Gool, 2000), and a detector of salient regions', proposed by Kadir, Zisserman and Brady (2004). The performance is measured against changes in viewpoint, scale, illumination, defocus and image compression. The objective of this paper is also to establish a reference test set of images and performance software, so that future detectors can be evaluated in the same framework. In this paper we propose a novel approach for detecting interest points invariant to scale and affine transformations. Our scale and affine invariant detectors are based on the following recent results: (1) Interest points extracted with the Harris detector can be adapted to affine transformations and give repeatable results (geometrically stable). (2) The characteristic scale of a local structure is indicated by a local extremum over scale of normalized derivatives (the Laplacian). (3) The affine shape of a point neighborhood is estimated based on the second moment matrix. Our scale invariant detector computes a multi-scale representation for the Harris interest point detector and then selects points at which a local measure (the Laplacian) is maximal over scales. This provides a set of distinctive points which are invariant to scale, rotation and translation as well as robust to illumination changes and limited changes of viewpoint. The characteristic scale determines a scale invariant region for each point. We extend the scale invariant detector to affine invariance by estimating the affine shape of a point neighborhood. An iterative algorithm modifies location, scale and neighborhood of each point and converges to affine invariant points. This method can deal with significant affine transformations including large scale changes. The characteristic scale and the affine shape of neighborhood determine an affine invariant region for each point. We present a comparative evaluation of different detectors and show that our approach provides better results than existing methods. The performance of our detector is also confirmed by excellent matching resultss the image is described by a set of scale affine invariant descriptors computed on the regions associated with our points. The detection of consistent feature points in an image is fundamental for various kinds of computer vision techniques, such as stereo matching, object recognition, target tracking and optical flow computation. This paper presents an event-based approach to the detection of corner points, which benefits from the high temporal resolution, compressed visual information and low latency provided by an asynchronous neuromorphic event-based camera. The proposed method adapts the commonly used Harris corner detector to the event-based data, in which frames are replaced by a stream of asynchronous events produced in response to local light changes at μs temporal resolution. Responding only to changes in its field of view, an event-based camera naturally enhances edges in the scene, simplifying the detection of corner features. We characterised and tested the method on both a controlled pattern and a real scenario, using the dynamic vision sensor (DVS) on the neuromorphic iCub robot. The method detects corners with a typical error distribution within 2 pixels. The error is constant for different motion velocities and directions, indicating a consistent detection across the scene and over time. We achieve a detection rate proportional to speed, higher than frame-based technique for a significant amount of motion in the scene, while also reducing the computational cost. Where feature points are used in real-time frame-rate applications, a high-speed feature detector is necessary. Feature detectors such as SIFT (DoG), Harris and SUSAN are good methods which yield high quality features, however they are too computationally intensive for use in real-time applications of any complexity. Here we show that machine learning can be used to derive a feature detector which can fully process live PAL video using less than 7 of the available processing time. By comparison neither the Harris detector (120 ) nor the detection stage of SIFT (300 ) can operate at full frame rate. Clearly a high-speed detector is of limited use if the features produced are unsuitable for downstream processing. In particular, the same scene viewed from two different positions should yield features which correspond to the same real-world 3D locations [1]. Hence the second contribution of this paper is a comparison corner detectors based on this criterion applied to 3D scenes. This comparison supports a number of claims made elsewhere concerning existing corner detectors. Further, contrary to our initial expectations, we show that despite being principally constructed for speed, our detector significantly outperforms existing feature detectors according to this criterion. Where feature points are used in real-time frame-rate applications, a high-speed feature detector is necessary. Feature detectors such as SIFT (DoG), Harris and SUSAN are good methods which yield high quality features, however they are too computationally intensive for use in real-time applications of any complexity. Here we show that machine learning can be used to derive a feature detector which can fully process live PAL video using less than 7 of tlie available processing time. By comparison neither the Harris detector (120 ) nor the detection stage of SIFT (300 ) can operate at full frame rate. Clearly a high-speed detector is of limited use if the features produced are unsuitable for downstream processing. In particular, the same scene viewed from two different positions should yield features which correspond to the same real-world 3D locations[1]. Hence the second contribution of this paper is a comparison corner detectors based on this criterion applied to 3D scenes. This comparison supports a number of claims made elsewhere concerning existing corner detectors. Further, contrary to our initial expectations, we show that despite being principally constructed for speed, our detector significantly outperforms existing feature detectors according to this criterion. In the past few years detection of repeatable and distinctive keypoints on 3D surfaces has been the focus of intense research activity, due on the one hand to the increasing diffusion of low-cost 3D sensors, on the other to the growing importance of applications such as 3D shape retrieval and 3D object recognition. This work aims at contributing to the maturity of this field by a thorough evaluation of several recent 3D keypoint detectors. A categorization of existing methods in two classes, that allows for highlighting their common traits, is proposed, so as to abstract all algorithms to two general structures. Moreover, a comprehensive experimental evaluation is carried out in terms of repeatability, distinctiveness and computational efficiency, based on a vast data corpus characterized by nuisances such as noise, clutter, occlusions and viewpoint changes. This paper presents a novel method for fully automatic and convenient extrinsic calibration of a 3D LiDAR and a panoramic camera with a normally printed chessboard. The proposed method is based on the 3D corner estimation of the chessboard from the sparse point cloud generated by one frame scan of the LiDAR. To estimate the corners, we formulate a full-scale model of the chessboard and fit it to the segmented 3D points of the chessboard. The model is fitted by optimizing the cost function under constraints of correlation between the reflectance intensity of laser and the color of the chessboard’s patterns. Powell’s method is introduced for resolving the discontinuity problem in optimization. The corners of the fitted model are considered as the 3D corners of the chessboard. Once the corners of the chessboard in the 3D point cloud are estimated, the extrinsic calibration of the two sensors is converted to a 3D-2D matching problem. The corresponding 3D-2D points are used to calculate the absolute pose of the two sensors with Unified Perspective-n-Point (UPnP). Further, the calculated parameters are regarded as initial values and are refined using the Levenberg-Marquardt method. The performance of the proposed corner detection method from the 3D point cloud is evaluated using simulations. The results of experiments, conducted on a Velodyne HDL-32e LiDAR and a Ladybug3 camera under the proposed re-projection error metric, qualitatively and quantitatively demonstrate the accuracy and stability of the final extrinsic calibration parameters. With the increasing amount of 3D data and the ability of capture devices to produce low-cost multimedia data, the capability to select relevant information has become an interesting research field. In 3D objects, the aim is to detect a few salient structures which can be used, instead of the whole object, for applications like object registration, retrieval, and mesh simplification. In this paper, we present an interest points detector for 3D objects based on Harris operator, which has been used with good results in computer vision applications. We propose an adaptive technique to determine the neighborhood of a vertex, over which the Harris response on that vertex is calculated. Our method is robust to several transformations, which can be seen in the high repeatability values obtained using the SHREC feature detection and description benchmark. In addition, we show that Harris 3D outperforms the results obtained by recent effective techniques such as Heat Kernel Signatures. Existing corner detection methods either extract boundaries and search for points having maximum curvature or apply a local operator in parallel to neighborhoods of a gray level picture. The key problem in these methods is the conversion of the gray levels of a pixel into a value reflecting a property of cornerness at that point. A neural network's ability to learn and to adapt together with its inherent parallelism and robustness has made it a natural choice for machine vision applications. This paper presents the application of neural networks to the problem of detecting corners in 2-D images. The performance of the system suggests its robustness and great potential. The extraction and description of keypoints as salient image parts has a long tradition within processing and analysis of 2D images. Nowadays, 3D data gains more and more importance. This paper discusses the benefits and limitations of keypoints for the task of fusing multiple 3D point clouds. For this goal, several combinations of 3D keypoint detectors and descriptors are tested. The experiments are based on 3D scenes with varying properties, including 3D scanner data as well as Kinect point clouds. The obtained results indicate that the specific method to extract and describe keypoints in 3D data has to be carefully chosen. In many cases the accuracy suffers from a too strong reduction of the available points to keypoints. We propose a new approach to appearance-based loop detection for mobile robots, using three-dimensional (3D) laser scans. Loop detection is an important problem in the simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) domain, and, because it can be seen as the problem of recognizing previously visited places, it is an example of the data association problem. Without a flat-floor assumption, two-dimensional laser-based approaches are bound to fail in many cases. Two of the problems with 3D approaches that we address in this paper are how to handle the greatly increased amount of data and how to efficiently obtain invariance to 3D rotations. We present a compact representation of 3D point clouds that is still discriminative enough to detect loop closures without false positives (i.e., detecting loop closure where there is none). A low false-positive rate is very important because wrong data association could have disastrous consequences in a SLAM algorithm. Our approach uses only the appearance of 3D point clouds to detect loops and requires no pose information. We exploit the normal distributions transform surface representation to create feature histograms based on surface orientation and smoothness. The surface shape histograms compress the input data by two to three orders of magnitude. Because of the high compression rate, the histograms can be matched efficiently to compare the appearance of two scans. Rotation invariance is achieved by aligning scans with respect to dominant surface orientations. We also propose to use expectation maximization to fit a gamma mixture model to the output similarity measures in order to automatically determine the threshold that separates scans at loop closures from nonoverlapping ones. We discuss the problem of determining ground truth in the context of loop detection and the difficulties in comparing the results of the few available methods based on range information. Furthermore, we present quantitative performance evaluations using three real-world data sets, one of which is highly self-similar, showing that the proposed method achieves high recall rates (percentage of correctly identified loop closures) at low false-positive rates in environments with different characteristics. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Despite the great progress achieved in recognizing objects as 2D bounding boxes in images, it is still very challenging to detect occluded objects and estimate the 3D properties of multiple objects from a single image. In this paper, we propose a novel object representation, 3D Voxel Pattern (3DVP), that jointly encodes the key properties of objects including appearance, 3D shape, viewpoint, occlusion and truncation. We discover 3DVPs in a data-driven way, and train a bank of specialized detectors for a dictionary of 3DVPs. The 3DVP detectors are capable of detecting objects with specific visibility patterns and transferring the meta-data from the 3DVPs to the detected objects, such as 2D segmentation mask, 3D pose as well as occlusion or truncation boundaries. The transferred meta-data allows us to infer the occlusion relationship among objects, which in turn provides improved object recognition results. Experiments are conducted on the KITTI detection benchmark [17] and the outdoor-scene dataset [41]. We improve state-of-the-art results on car detection and pose estimation with notable margins (6 in difficult data of KITTI). We also verify the ability of our method in accurately segmenting objects from the background and localizing them in 3D. This paper presents a new method for detecting scale invariant interest points. The method is based on two recent results on scale space: (1) Interest points can be adapted to scale and give repeatable results (geometrically stable). (2) Local extrema over scale of normalized derivatives indicate the presence of characteristic local structures. Our method first computes a multi-scale representation for the Harris interest point detector. We then select points at which a local measure (the Laplacian) is maximal over scales. This allows a selection of distinctive points for which the characteristic scale is known. These points are invariant to scale, rotation and translation as well as robust to illumination changes and limited changes of viewpoint. For indexing, the image is characterized by a set of scale invariant points; the scale associated with each point allows the computation of a scale invariant descriptor. Our descriptors are, in addition, invariant to image rotation, of affine illumination changes and robust to small perspective deformations. Experimental results for indexing show an excellent performance up to a scale factor of 4 for a database with more than 5000 images. In this paper we consider the problem of recovering the free space of an indoor scene from its single image. We show that exploiting the box like geometric structure of furniture and constraints provided by the scene, allows us to recover the extent of major furniture objects in 3D. Our “boxy” detector localizes box shaped objects oriented parallel to the scene across different scales and object types, and thus blocks out the occupied space in the scene. To localize the objects more accurately in 3D we introduce a set of specially designed features that capture the floor contact points of the objects. Image based metrics are not very indicative of performance in 3D. We make the first attempt to evaluate single view based occupancy estimates for 3D errors and propose several task driven performance measures towards it. On our dataset of 592 indoor images marked with full 3D geometry of the scene, we show that: (a) our detector works well using image based metrics; (b) our refinement method produces significant improvements in localization in 3D; and (c) if one evaluates using 3D metrics, our method offers major improvements over other single view based scene geometry estimation methods. The depth information of RGB-D sensors has greatly simplified some common challenges in computer vision and enabled breakthroughs for several tasks. In this paper, we propose to use depth maps for object detection and design a 3D detector to overcome the major difficulties for recognition, namely the variations of texture, illumination, shape, viewpoint, clutter, occlusion, self-occlusion and sensor noises. We take a collection of 3D CAD models and render each CAD model from hundreds of viewpoints to obtain synthetic depth maps. For each depth rendering, we extract features from the 3D point cloud and train an Exemplar-SVM classifier. During testing and hard-negative mining, we slide a 3D detection window in 3D space. Experiment results show that our 3D detector significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithms for both RGB and RGB-D images, and achieves about ×1.7 improvement on average precision compared to DPM and R-CNN. All source code and data are available online. We propose CornerNet, a new approach to object detection where we detect an object bounding box as a pair of keypoints, the top-left corner and the bottom-right corner, using a single convolution neural network. By detecting objects as paired keypoints, we eliminate the need for designing a set of anchor boxes commonly used in prior single-stage detectors. In addition to our novel formulation, we introduce corner pooling, a new type of pooling layer that helps the network better localize corners. Experiments show that CornerNet achieves a 42.2 AP on MS COCO, outperforming all existing one-stage detectors. Tomographic image reconstruction, such as the reconstruction of computed tomography projection values, of tomosynthesis data, positron emission tomography or SPECT events, and of magnetic resonance imaging data is computationally very demanding. One of the most time-consuming steps is the backprojection. Recently, a novel general purpose architecture optimized for distributed computing became available: the cell broadband engine (CBE). To maximize image reconstruction speed we modified our parallel-beam backprojection algorithm [two dimensional (2D)] and our perspective backprojection algorithm [three dimensional (3D), cone beam for flat–panel detectors] and optimized the code for the CBE. The algorithms are pixel or voxel driven, run with floating point accuracy and use linear (LI) or nearest neighbor (NN) interpolation between detector elements. For the parallel-beam case, 512 projections per half rotation, 1024 detector channels, and an image of size 512 2 was used. The cone-beam backprojection performance was assessed by backprojecting a full circle scan of 512 projections of size 1024 2 into a volume of size 512 3 voxels. The field of view was chosen to completely lie within the field of measurement and the pixel or voxel size was set to correspond to the detector element size projected to the center of rotation divided by 2 . Both the PC and the CBE were clocked at 3 GHz . For the parallel backprojection of 512 projections into a 512 2 image, a throughput of 11 fps (LI) and 15 fps (NN) was measured on the PC, whereas the CBE achieved 126 fps (LI) and 165 fps (NN), respectively. The cone-beam backprojection of 512 projections into the 512 3 volume took 3.2 min on the PC and is as fast as 13.6 s on the cell. Thereby, the cell greatly outperforms today’s top-notch backprojections based on graphical processing units. Using both CBEs of our dual cell-based blade (Mercury Computer Systems) allows to 2D backproject 330 images s and one can complete the 3D cone-beam backprojection in 6.8 s . We explore the performance of a number of popular feature detectors and descriptors in matching 3D object features across viewpoints and lighting conditions. To this end we design a method, based on intersecting epipolar constraints, for providing ground truth correspondence automatically. These correspondences are based purely on geometric information, and do not rely on the choice of a specific feature appearance descriptor. We test detector-descriptor combinations on a database of 100 objects viewed from 144 calibrated viewpoints under three different lighting conditions. We find that the combination of Hessian-affine feature finder and SIFT features is most robust to viewpoint change. Harris-affine combined with SIFT and Hessian-affine combined with shape context descriptors were best respectively for lighting change and change in camera focal length. We also find that no detector-descriptor combination performs well with viewpoint changes of more than 25---30?. Over the last decade, several techniques have been developed for looking around the corner by exploiting the round-trip travel time of photons. Typically, these techniques necessitate the collection of a large number of measurements with varying virtual source and virtual detector locations. This data is then processed by a reconstruction algorithm to estimate the hidden scene. As a consequence, even when the region of interest in the hidden volume is small and limited, the acquisition time needed is large as the entire dataset has to be acquired and then processed.In this paper, we present the first example of scanning based non-line-of-sight imaging technique. The key idea is that if the virtual sources (pulsed sources) on the wall are delayed using a quadratic delay profile (much like the quadratic phase of a focusing lens), then these pulses arrive at the same instant at a single point in the hidden volume – the point being scanned. On the imaging side, applying quadratic delays to the virtual detectors before integration on a single gated detector allows us to ‘focus’ and scan each point in the hidden volume. By changing the quadratic delay profiles, we can focus light at different points in the hidden volume. This provides the first example of scanning based non-line-of-sight imaging, allowing us to focus our measurements only in the region of interest. We derive the theoretical underpinnings of ‘temporal focusing’, show compelling simulations of performance analysis, build a hardware prototype system and demonstrate real results.