Simultaneous Localization and Mapping using RGB-D cameras has been a fertile research topic in the latest decade, due to the suitability of such sensors for indoor robotics. In this paper we propose a direct RGB-D SLAM algorithm with state-of-the-art accuracy and robustness at a los cost. Our experiments in the RGB-D TUM dataset [34] effectively show a better accuracy and robustness in CPU real time than direct RGB-D SLAM systems that make use of the GPU. The key ingredients of our approach are mainly two. Firstly, the combination of a semi-dense photometric and dense geometric error for the pose tracking (see Figure 1), which we demonstrate to be the most accurate alternative. And secondly, a model of the multi-view constraints and their errors in the mapping and tracking threads, which adds extra information over other approaches. We release the open-source implementation of our approach 1 . The reader is referred to a video with our results 2 for a more illustrative visualization of its performance.
@cite_0 is one of the first approaches that proposes to minimize the photometric error between the current frame and a past frame.
@cite_0
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In this paper, we propose a dense visual SLAM method for RGB-D cameras that minimizes both the photometric and the depth error over all pixels. In contrast to sparse, feature-based methods, this allows us to better exploit the available information in the image data which leads to higher pose accuracy. Furthermore, we propose an entropy-based similarity measure for keyframe selection and loop closure detection. From all successful matches, we build up a graph that we optimize using the g2o framework. We evaluated our approach extensively on publicly available benchmark datasets, and found that it performs well in scenes with low texture as well as low structure. In direct comparison to several state-of-the-art methods, our approach yields a significantly lower trajectory error. We release our software as open-source. In this paper we present a dense visual odometry system for RGB-D cameras performing both photometric and geometric error minimisation to estimate the camera motion between frames. Contrary to most works in the literature, we parametrise the geometric error by the inverse depth instead of the depth, which translates into a better fit of the distribution of the geometric error to the used robust cost functions. We also provide a unified evaluation under the same framework of different estimators and ways of computing the scale of the residuals which can be found spread along the related literature. For the comparison of our approach with state-of-the-art approaches we use the popular dataset from the TUM for RGB-D benchmarking. Our approach shows to be competitive with state-of-the-art methods in terms of drift in meters per second, even compared to methods performing loop closure too. When comparing to approaches performing pure odometry like ours, our method outperforms them in the majority of the tested datasets. Additionally we show that our approach is able to work in real time and we provide a qualitative evaluation on our own sequences showing a low drift in the 3D reconstructions. We present VI-DSO, a novel approach for visual-inertial odometry, which jointly estimates camera poses and sparse scene geometry by minimizing photometric and IMU measurement errors in a combined energy functional. The visual part of the system performs a bundle-adjustment like optimization on a sparse set of points, but unlike key-point based systems it directly minimizes a photometric error. This makes it possible for the system to track not only corners, but any pixels with large enough intensity gradients. IMU information is accumulated between several frames using measurement preintegration, and is inserted into the optimization as an additional constraint between keyframes. We explicitly include scale and gravity direction into our model and jointly optimize them together with other variables such as poses. As the scale is often not immediately observable using IMU data this allows us to initialize our visual-inertial system with an arbitrary scale instead of having to delay the initialization until everything is observable. We perform partial marginalization of old variables so that updates can be computed in a reasonable time. In order to keep the system consistent we propose a novel strategy which we call "dynamic marginalization". This technique allows us to use partial marginalization even in cases where the initial scale estimate is far from the optimum. We evaluate our method on the challenging EuRoC dataset, showing that VI-DSO outperforms the state of the art. Abstract This paper mathematically analyzes and proposes new solutions for the problem of estimating the camera 3D location and orientation ( pose determination ) from a matched set of 3D model and 2D image landmark features. Least-squares techniques for line tokens, which minimize both rotation and translation simultaneously, are developed and shown to be far superior to the earlier techniques which solved for rotation first and then translation. However, least-squares techniques fail catastrophically when outliers (or gross errors) are present in the match data. Outliers arise frequently due to incorrect correspondences or gross errors in the 3D model. Robust techniques for pose determination are developed to handle data contaminated by fewer than 50.0 outliers. Finally, the sensitivity of pose determination to incorrect estimates of camera parameters is analyzed. It is shown that for small field of view systems, offsets in the image center do not significantly affect the location of the camera in a world coordinate system. Errors in the focal length significantly affect only the component of translation along the optical axis in the pose computation. This paper presents a visual-inertial odometry framework that tightly fuses inertial measurements with visual data from one or more cameras, by means of an iterated extended Kalman filter. By employing image patches as landmark descriptors, a photometric error is derived, which is directly integrated as an innovation term in the filter update step. Consequently, the data association is an inherent part of the estimation process and no additional feature extraction or matching processes are required. Furthermore, it enables the tracking of noncorner-shaped features, such as lines, and thereby increases the set of possible landmarks. The filter state is formulated in a fully robocentric fashion, which reduces errors related to nonlinearities. This also includes partitioning of a landmark’s location estimate into a bearing vector and distance and thereby allows an undelayed initialization of landmarks. Overall, this results in a compact approach, which exhibits a high level of robustness with respect to low ... In the context of extracting information from video, bad weather conditions like rain can have a detrimental effect. In this paper, a novel framework to detect and remove rain streaks from video is proposed. The first part of the proposed framework for rain removal is a technique to detect rain streaks based on phase congruency features. The variation of features from frame to frame is used to estimate the candidate rain pixels in a frame. In order to reduce the number of false candidates due to global motion, frames are registered using phase correlation. The second part of the proposed framework is a novel reconstruction technique that utilizes information from three different sources, which are intensities of the rain affected pixel, spatial neighbors, and temporal neighbors. An optimal estimate for the actual intensity of the rain affected pixel is made based on the minimization of registration error between frames. An optical flow technique using local phase information is adopted for registration. This part of the proposed framework for removing rain is modeled such that the presence of local motion will not distort the features in the reconstructed video. The proposed framework is evaluated quantitatively and qualitatively on a variety of videos with varying complexities. The effectiveness of the algorithm is quantitatively verified by computing a no-reference image quality measure on individual frames of the reconstructed video. From a variety of experiments that are performed on output videos, it is shown that the proposed technique performs better than state-of-the-art techniques. The goal of our work is to provide a fast and accurate method to estimate the camera motion from RGB-D images. Our approach registers two consecutive RGB-D frames directly upon each other by minimizing the photometric error. We estimate the camera motion using non-linear minimization in combination with a coarse-to-fine scheme. To allow for noise and outliers in the image data, we propose to use a robust error function that reduces the influence of large residuals. Furthermore, our formulation allows for the inclusion of a motion model which can be based on prior knowledge, temporal filtering, or additional sensors like an IMU. Our method is attractive for robots with limited computational resources as it runs in real-time on a single CPU core and has a small, constant memory footprint. In an extensive set of experiments carried out both on a benchmark dataset and synthetic data, we demonstrate that our approach is more accurate and robust than previous methods. We provide our software under an open source license. The Perspective-Three-Point (P3P) problem aims at determining the position and orientation of the camera in the world reference frame from three 2D-3D point correspondences. This problem is known to provide up to four solutions that can then be disambiguated using a fourth point. All existing solutions attempt to first solve for the position of the points in the camera reference frame, and then compute the position and orientation of the camera in the world frame, which alignes the two point sets. In contrast, in this paper we propose a novel closed-form solution to the P3P problem, which computes the aligning transformation directly in a single stage, without the intermediate derivation of the points in the camera frame. This is made possible by introducing intermediate camera and world reference frames, and expressing their relative position and orientation using only two parameters. The projection of a world point into the parametrized camera pose then leads to two conditions and finally a quartic equation for finding up to four solutions for the parameter pair. A subsequent backsubstitution directly leads to the corresponding camera poses with respect to the world reference frame. We show that the proposed algorithm offers accuracy and precision comparable to a popular, standard, state-of-the-art approach but at much lower computational cost (15 times faster). Furthermore, it provides improved numerical stability and is less affected by degenerate configurations of the selected world points. The superior computational efficiency is particularly suitable for any RANSAC-outlier-rejection step, which is always recommended before applying PnP or non-linear optimization of the final solution. This paper proposes a novel method for tracking failure detection. The detection is based on the Forward-Backward error, i.e. the tracking is performed forward and backward in time and the discrepancies between these two trajectories are measured. We demonstrate that the proposed error enables reliable detection of tracking failures and selection of reliable trajectories in video sequences. We demonstrate that the approach is complementary to commonly used normalized cross-correlation (NCC). Based on the error, we propose a novel object tracker called Median Flow. State-of-the-art performance is achieved on challenging benchmark video sequences which include non-rigid objects. We present a photometric stereo method for non-rigid objects of unknown and spatially varying materials. The prior art uses time-multiplexed illumination but assumes constant surface normals across several frames, fundamentally limiting the accuracy of the estimated normals. We explicitly account for time-varying surface orientations, and show that for unknown Lambertian materials, five images are sufficient to recover surface orientation in one frame. Our optimized system implementation exploits the physical properties of typical cameras and LEDs to reduce the required number of images to just three, and also facilitates frame-to-frame image alignment using standard optical flow methods, despite varying illumination. We demonstrate the system's performance by computing surface orientations for several different moving, deforming objects. In this paper, we show that tracking multiple people whose paths may intersect can be formulated as a convex global optimization problem. Our proposed framework is designed to exploit image appearance cues to prevent identity switches. Our method is effective even when such cues are only available at distant time intervals. This is unlike many current approaches that depend on appearance being exploitable from frame to frame. We validate our approach on three multi-camera sport and pedestrian datasets that contain long and complex sequences. Our algorithm perseveres identities better than state-of-the-art algorithms while keeping similar MOTA scores. Recovery from tracking failure is essential in any simultaneous localization and tracking system. In this context, we explore an efficient keyframe-based relocalization method based on frame encoding using randomized ferns. The method enables automatic discovery of keyframes through online harvesting in tracking mode, and fast retrieval of pose candidates in the case when tracking is lost. Frame encoding is achieved by applying simple binary feature tests which are stored in the nodes of an ensemble of randomized ferns. The concatenation of small block codes generated by each fern yields a global compact representation of camera frames. Based on those representations we define the frame dissimilarity as the block-wise hamming distance (BlockHD). Dissimilarities between an incoming query frame and a large set of keyframes can be efficiently evaluated by simply traversing the nodes of the ferns and counting image co-occurrences in corresponding code tables. In tracking mode, those dissimilarities decide whether a frame pose pair is considered as a novel keyframe. For tracking recovery, poses of the most similar keyframes are retrieved and used for reinitialization of the tracking algorithm. The integration of our relocalization method into a hand-held KinectFusion system allows seamless continuation of mapping even when tracking is frequently lost. We propose an efficient approach to exploiting motion information from consecutive frames of a video sequence to recover the 3D pose of people. Instead of computing candidate poses in individual frames and then linking them, as is often done, we regress directly from a spatio-temporal block of frames to a 3D pose in the central one. We will demonstrate that this approach allows us to effectively overcome ambiguities and to improve upon the state-of-the-art on challenging sequences. In this paper we give an evaluation of different methods for computing frame-to-frame motion estimates for a moving RGB-D sensor, by means of aligning two images using photometric error minimization. These kind of algorithms have recently shown to be very accurate and robust and therefore provide an attractive solution for robot ego-motion estimation and navigation. We demonstrate three different alignment strategies, namely the Forward-Compositional, the Inverse-Compositional and the Efficient Second-Order Minimization approach, in a general robust estimation framework. We further show how estimating global affine illumination changes, in general improves the performance of the algorithms. We compare our results with recently published work, considered as state-of-the art in this field, and show that our solutions are in general more precise and can perform in real-time on standard hardware. We propose an efficient approach to exploiting motion information from consecutive frames of a video sequence to recover the 3D pose of people. Previous approaches typically compute candidate poses in individual frames and then link them in a post-processing step to resolve ambiguities. By contrast, we directly regress from a spatio-temporal volume of bounding boxes to a 3D pose in the central frame. We further show that, for this approach to achieve its full potential, it is essential to compensate for the motion in consecutive frames so that the subject remains centered. This then allows us to effectively overcome ambiguities and improve upon the state-of-the-art by a large margin on the Human3.6m, HumanEva, and KTH Multiview Football 3D human pose estimation benchmarks. We propose an efficient approach to exploiting motion information from consecutive frames of a video sequence to recover the 3D pose of people. Previous approaches typically compute candidate poses in individual frames and then link them in a post-processing step to resolve ambiguities. By contrast, we directly regress from a spatio-temporal volume of bounding boxes to a 3D pose in the central frame. We further show that, for this approach to achieve its full potential, it is essential to compensate for the motion in consecutive frames so that the subject remains centered. This then allows us to effectively overcome ambiguities and improve upon the state-of-the-art by a large margin on the Human3.6m, HumanEva, and KTH Multiview Football 3D human pose estimation benchmarks. We propose a novel method to estimate a unique and repeatable reference frame in the context of 3D object recognition from a single viewpoint based on global descriptors. We show that the ability of defining a robust reference frame on both model and scene views allows creating descriptive global representations of the object view, with the beneficial effect of enhancing the spatial descriptiveness of the feature and its ability to recognize objects by means of a simple nearest neighbor classifier computed on the descriptor space. Moreover, the definition of repeatable directions can be deployed to efficiently retrieve the 6DOF pose of the objects in a scene. We experimentally demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method on a dataset including 23 scenes acquired with the Microsoft Kinect sensor and 25 full-3D models by comparing the proposed approach with state-of-the-art global descriptors. A substantial improvement is presented regarding accuracy in recognition and 6DOF pose estimation, as well as in terms of computational performance. Letλi(L), λi(L*) denote the successive minima of a latticeL and its reciprocal latticeL*, and let [b1,..., b n ] be a basis ofL that is reduced in the sense of Korkin and Zolotarev. We prove that Open image in new window and Open image in new window , where Open image in new window andγj denotes Hermite's constant. As a consequence the inequalities Open image in new window are obtained forn≥7. Given a basisB of a latticeL in ℝ m of rankn andx∃ℝ m , we define polynomial time computable quantitiesλ(B) andΜ(x,B) that are lower bounds for λ1(L) andΜ(x,L), whereΜ(x,L) is the Euclidean distance fromx to the closest vector inL. If in additionB is reciprocal to a Korkin-Zolotarev basis ofL*, then λ1(L)≤γ n * λ(B) and Open image in new window . This paper presents a technique for acquiring the shape of real-world objects with complex isotropic and anisotropic reflectance. Our method estimates the local normal and tangent vectors at each pixel in a reference view from a sequence of images taken under varying point lighting. We show that for many real-world materials and a restricted set of light positions, the 2D slice of the BRDF obtained by fixing the local view direction is symmetric under reflections of the halfway vector across the normal-tangent and normal-binormal planes. Based on this analysis, we develop an optimization that estimates the local surface frame by identifying these planes of symmetry in the measured BRDF. As with other photometric methods, a key benefit of our approach is that the input is easy to acquire and is less sensitive to calibration errors than stereo or multi-view techniques. Unlike prior work, our approach allows estimating the surface tangent in the case of anisotropic reflectance. We confirm the accuracy and reliability of our approach with analytic and measured data, present several normal and tangent fields acquired with our technique, and demonstrate applications to appearance editing. In the registration of temporal and stereo retinal images, the rotation angle is normally less than 5^o and the scaling factor is between 0.95 and 1.05. Due to sitting constraints in the imaging process, the x translation can be more than 100pixels, but the y translation is usually small. This paper successfully incorporates these constraints in the mutual information-based registration and exploits a constrained optimization to seek an optimal registration. The proposed approach increases the success rate of the registration algorithm significantly. The impacts of the dynamic ranges of registration parameters on the registration outcome are studied and the effects of the order of rotation, scaling, and translation are also investigated.