We focus on the problem of estimating the orientation of the ground plane with respect to a mobile monocular camera platform (e.g., ground robot, wearable camera, assistive robotic platform). To address this problem, we formulate the ground plane estimation problem as an inter-mingled multi-task prediction problem by jointly optimizing for point-wise surface normal direction, 2D ground segmentation, and depth estimates. Our proposed model -- GroundNet -- estimates the ground normal in two streams separately and then a consistency loss is applied on top of the two streams to enforce geometric consistency. A semantic segmentation stream is used to isolate the ground regions and are used to selectively back-propagate parameter updates only through the ground regions in the image. Our experiments on KITTI and ApolloScape datasets verify that the GroundNet is able to predict consistent depth and normal within the ground region. It also achieves top performance on ground plane normal estimation and horizon line detection.
Geometry-based methods often extract the 3D scene structure (, using multi-view cues, motion cues or depth sensors) and then the ground plane is fitted to the 3D points using a robust model fitting algorithm like RANSAC. @cite_41 identifying the ground using the 3D point cloud from LIDAR. @cite_42 obtains the video frame rate depth maps from the time-of-flight (TOF) cameras and exploits 4D spatiotemporal RANSAC for ground plane estimation. @cite_11 generates the 3D point cloud under a stereo setup and then estimates the ground plane by disparity. Assuming the scene is static, simultaneous localizing and mapping (SLAM) and structure from motion (SFM) approaches can also be used for extracting the 3D scene structure @cite_39 @cite_29 @cite_37 @cite_28 @cite_5 @cite_13 , making ground plane estimation possible.
@cite_37 @cite_41 @cite_28 @cite_29 @cite_42 @cite_39 @cite_5 @cite_13 @cite_11
2099361355 2060772243 2145804667 2061458897
We present a real-time approach for image-based localization within large scenes that have been reconstructed offline using structure from motion (Sfm). From monocular video, our method continuously computes a precise 6-DOF camera pose, by efficiently tracking natural features and matching them to 3D points in the Sfm point cloud. Our main contribution lies in efficiently interleaving a fast keypoint tracker that uses inexpensive binary feature descriptors with a new approach for direct 2D-to-3D matching. The 2D-to-3D matching avoids the need for online extraction of scale-invariant features. Instead, offline we construct an indexed database containing multiple DAISY descriptors per 3D point extracted at multiple scales. The key to the efficiency of our method lies in invoking DAISY descriptor extraction and matching sparingly during localization, and in distributing this computation over a window of successive frames. This enables the algorithm to run in real-time, without fluctuations in the latency over long durations. We evaluate the method in large indoor and outdoor scenes. Our algorithm runs at over 30 Hz on a laptop and at 12 Hz on a low-power, mobile computer suitable for onboard computation on a quadrotor micro aerial vehicle. Conventional rigid structure from motion (SFM) addresses the problem of recovering the camera parameters (motion) and the 3D locations (structure) of scene points, given observed 2D image feature points. In this paper, we propose a new formulation called Semantic Structure From Motion (SSFM). In addition to the geometrical constraints provided by SFM, SSFM takes advantage of both semantic and geometrical properties associated with objects in the scene (Fig. 1). These properties allow us to recover not only the structure and motion but also the 3D locations, poses, and categories of objects in the scene. We cast this problem as a max-likelihood problem where geometry (cameras, points, objects) and semantic information (object classes) are simultaneously estimated. The key intuition is that, in addition to image features, the measurements of objects across views provide additional geometrical constraints that relate cameras and scene parameters. These constraints make the geometry estimation process more robust and, in turn, make object detection more accurate. Our framework has the unique ability to: i) estimate camera poses only from object detections, ii) enhance camera pose estimation, compared to feature-point-based SFM algorithms, iii) improve object detections given multiple un-calibrated images, compared to independently detecting objects in single images. Extensive quantitative results on three datasets–LiDAR cars, street-view pedestrians, and Kinect office desktop–verify our theoretical claims. We present a novel method to obtain a 3D Euclidean reconstruction of both the background and moving objects in a video sequence. We assume that, multiple objects are moving rigidly on a ground plane observed by a moving camera. The video sequence is first segmented into static background and motion blobs by a homography-based motion segmentation method. Then classical "Structure from Motion" (SfM) techniques are applied to obtain a Euclidean reconstruction of the static background. The motion blob corresponding to each moving object is treated as if there were a static object observed by a hypothetical moving camera, called a "virtual camera". This virtual camera shares the same intrinsic parameters with the real camera but moves differently due to object motion. The same SfM techniques are applied to estimate the 3D shape of each moving object and the pose of the virtual camera. We show that the unknown scale of moving objects can be approximately determined by the ground plane, which is a key contribution of this paper. Another key contribution is that we prove that the 3D motion of moving objects can be solved from the virtual camera motion with a linear constraint imposed on the object translation. In our approach, a planartranslation constraint is formulated: "the 3D instantaneous translation of moving objects must be parallel to the ground plane". Results on real-world video sequences demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our approach. We present an approach to jointly estimating camera motion and dense structure of a static scene in terms of depth maps from monocular image sequences in driver-assistance scenarios. At each instant of time, only two consecutive frames are processed as input data of a joint estimator that fully exploits second-order information of the corresponding optimization problem and effectively copes with the non-convexity due to both the imaging geometry and the manifold of motion parameters. Additionally, carefully designed Gaussian approximations enable probabilistic inference based on locally varying confidence and globally varying sensitivity due to the epipolar geometry, with respect to the high-dimensional depth map estimation. Embedding the resulting joint estimator in an online recursive framework achieves a pronounced spatio-temporal filtering effect and robustness. We evaluate hundreds of images taken from a car moving at speed up to 100 km h and being part of a publicly available benchmark data set. The results compare favorably with two alternative settings: stereo based scene reconstruction and camera motion estimation in batch mode using multiple frames. They, however, require a calibrated camera pair or storage for more than two frames, which is less attractive from a technical viewpoint than the proposed monocular and recursive approach. In addition to real data, a synthetic sequence is considered which provides reliable ground truth.