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.
Kintinuous @cite_9 builds on KinectFusion and uses a rolling cyclical buffer that shifts the volume as the camera is moving, hence not being restricted to small workspaces. It also includes loop closing and pose graph optimization for global consistency.
@cite_9
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In this paper we propose an extension to the KinectFusion approach which enables both SLAM-graph optimization, usually required on large looping routes, as well as discovery of semantic information in the form of object detection and localization. Global optimization is achieved by incorporating the notion of keyframe into a KinectFusion-style approach, thus providing the system with the ability to explore large environments and maintain a globally consistent map. Moreover, we integrate into the system our recent object detection approach based on a new Semantic Bundle Adjustment paradigm, thereby achieving joint detection, tracking and mapping. Although our current implementation is not optimized for real-time operation, the principles and ideas set forth in this paper can be considered a relevant contribution towards a Semantic KinectFusion system. Low cost CMOS cameras can have an acquisition mode called rolling shutter which sequentially exposes the scan-lines. When a single object moves with respect to the camera, this creates image distortions. Assuming 2D-3D correspondences known, previous work showed that the object pose and kinematics can be estimated from a single rolling shutter image. This was achieved using a suboptimal initialization followed by local iterative optimization. We propose a polynomial projection model for rolling shutter cameras and a constrained global optimization of its parameters. This is done by means of a semidefinite programming problem obtained from the generalized problem of moments method. Contrarily to previous work, our optimization does not require an initialization and ensures that the global minimum is achieved. This allows us to build automatically robust 2D-3D correspondences using a template to provide an initial set of correspondences. Experiments show that our method slightly improves previous work on both simulated and real data. This is due to local minima into which previous methods get trapped. We also successfully experimented building 2D-3D correspondences automatically with both simulated and real data. We present a novel approach to real-time dense visual SLAM. Our system is capable of capturing comprehensive dense globally consistent surfel-based maps of room scale environments explored using an RGB-D camera in an incremental online fashion, without pose graph optimisation or any postprocessing steps. This is accomplished by using dense frame-tomodel camera tracking and windowed surfel-based fusion coupled with frequent model refinement through non-rigid surface deformations. Our approach applies local model-to-model surface loop closure optimisations as often as possible to stay close to the mode of the map distribution, while utilising global loop closure to recover from arbitrary drift and maintain global consistency. We tackle the problem of estimating the 3D pose of an individual's upper limbs (arms+hands) from a chest mounted depth-camera. Importantly, we consider pose estimation during everyday interactions with objects. Past work shows that strong pose+viewpoint priors and depth-based features are crucial for robust performance. In egocentric views, hands and arms are observable within a well defined volume in front of the camera. We call this volume an egocentric workspace. A notable property is that hand appearance correlates with workspace location. To exploit this correlation, we classify arm+hand configurations in a global egocentric coordinate frame, rather than a local scanning window. This greatly simplify the architecture and improves performance. We propose an efficient pipeline which 1) generates synthetic workspace exemplars for training using a virtual chest-mounted camera whose intrinsic parameters match our physical camera, 2) computes perspective-aware depth features on this entire volume and 3) recognizes discrete arm+hand pose classes through a sparse multi-class SVM. We achieve state-of-the-art hand pose recognition performance from egocentric RGB-D images in real-time. This paper describes extensions to the Kintinuous [1] algorithm for spatially extended KinectFusion, incorporating the following additions: (i) the integration of multiple 6DOF camera odometry estimation methods for robust tracking; (ii) a novel GPU-based implementation of an existing dense RGB-D visual odometry algorithm; (iii) advanced fused realtime surface coloring. These extensions are validated with extensive experimental results, both quantitative and qualitative, demonstrating the ability to build dense fully colored models of spatially extended environments for robotics and virtual reality applications while remaining robust against scenes with challenging sets of geometric and visual features. We present a novel approach to real-time dense visual simultaneous localisation and mapping. Our system is capable of capturing comprehensive dense globally consistent surfel-based maps of room scale environments and beyond explored using an RGB-D camera in an incremental online fashion, without pose graph optimization or any post-processing steps. This is accomplished by using dense frame-to-model camera tracking and windowed surfel-based fusion coupled with frequent model refinement through non-rigid surface deformations. Our approach applies local model-to-model surface loop closure optimizations as often as possible to stay close to the mode of the map distribution, while utilizing global loop closure to recover from arbitrary drift and maintain global consistency. In the spirit of improving map quality as well as tracking accuracy and robustness, we furthermore explore a novel approach to real-time discrete light source detection. This technique is capable of detecting numerous light sources in indoo... With the advent of real-time dense scene reconstruction from handheld cameras, one key aspect to enable robust operation is the ability to relocalise in a previously mapped environment or after loss of measurement. Tasks such as operating on a workspace, where moving objects and occlusions are likely, require a recovery competence in order to be useful. For RGBD cameras, this must also include the ability to relocalise in areas with reduced visual texture. This paper describes a method for relocalisation of a freely moving RGBD camera in small workspaces. The approach combines both 2D image and 3D depth information to estimate the full 6D camera pose. The method uses a general regression over a set of synthetic views distributed throughout an informed estimate of possible camera viewpoints. The resulting relocalisation is accurate and works faster than framerate and the system’s performance is demonstrated through a comparison against visual and geometric feature matching relocalisation techniques on sequences with moving objects and minimal texture. It is well known that the rolling shutter effect in images captured with a moving rolling shutter camera causes inaccuracies to 3D reconstructions. The problem is further aggravated with weak visual connectivity from wide baseline images captured with a fast moving camera. In this paper, we propose and implement a pipeline for sparse to dense 3D construction with wide baseline images captured from a fast moving rolling shutter camera. Specifically, we propose a cost function for Bundle Adjustment (BA) that models the rolling shutter effect, incorporates GPS INS readings, and enforces pairwise smoothness between neighboring poses. We optimize over the 3D structures, camera poses and velocities. We also introduce a novel interpolation scheme for the rolling shutter plane sweep stereo algorithm that allows us to achieve a 7× speed up in the depth map computations for dense reconstruction without losing accuracy. We evaluate our proposed pipeline over a 2.6km image sequence captured with a rolling shutter camera mounted on a moving car. This paper presents a method to build large-scale mosaics adapted to underwater sonar imagery. By assuming a simplified imaging model, we propose to address the registrations between images using Fourier-based methods which, unlike feature-based methods, prove well suited to handle the characteristics of forward-looking sonar images, such as low resolution, noise, occlusions and moving shadows. The registration between spatially and temporally distant images resulting from loop-closing situations or registrations in featureless areas are feasible, overcoming the main difficulties of feature-based methods. The problem is cast as a pose-based graph optimization, taking into account the uncertainties of the pairwise registrations and being able to incorporate navigation information. After the optimization, a consistent mosaic from different tracklines is generated with increased resolution and higher signal-to-noise ratio than the original images, while the vehicle motion in x,y and heading is also estimated. An original concept for computing instantaneous 3D pose and 3D velocity of fast moving objects using a single view is proposed, implemented and validated. It takes advantage of the image deformations induced by rolling shutter in CMOS image sensors. First of all, after analysing the rolling shutter phenomenon, we introduce an original model of the image formation when using such a camera, based on a general model of moving rigid sets of 3D points. Using 2D-3D point correspondences, we derive two complementary methods, compensating for the rolling shutter deformations to deliver an accurate 3D pose and exploiting them to also estimate the full 3D velocity. The first solution is a general one based on non-linear optimization and bundle adjustment, usable for any object, while the second one is a closed-form linear solution valid for planar objects. The resulting algorithms enable us to transform a CMOS low cost and low power camera into an innovative and powerful velocity sensor. Finally, experimental results with real data confirm the relevance and accuracy of the approach. In this paper, we propose a novel method to jointly solve scene layout estimation and global registration problems for accurate indoor 3D reconstruction. Given a sequence of range data, we first build a set of scene fragments using KinectFusion and register them through pose graph optimization. Afterwards, we alternate between layout estimation and layout-based global registration processes in iterative fashion to complement each other. We extract the scene layout through hierarchical agglomerative clustering and energy-based multi-model fitting in consideration of noisy measurements. Having the estimated scene layout in one hand, we register all the range data through the global iterative closest point algorithm where the positions of 3D points that belong to the layout such as walls and a ceiling are constrained to be close to the layout. We experimentally verify the proposed method with the publicly available synthetic and real-world datasets in both quantitative and qualitative ways. In this paper we present an extension to the KinectFusion algorithm that permits dense mesh-based mapping of extended scale environments in real-time. This is achieved through (i) altering the original algorithm such that the region of space being mapped by the KinectFusion algorithm can vary dynamically, (ii) extracting a dense point cloud from the regions that leave the KinectFusion volume due to this variation, and, (iii) incrementally adding the resulting points to a triangular mesh representation of the environment. The system is implemented as a set of hierarchical multi-threaded components which are capable of operating in real-time. The architecture facilitates the creation and integration of new modules with minimal impact on the performance on the dense volume tracking and surface reconstruction modules. We provide experimental results demonstrating the system’s ability to map areas considerably beyond the scale of the original KinectFusion algorithm including a two story apartment and an extended sequence taken from a car at night. In order to overcome failure of the iterative closest point (ICP) based odometry in areas of low geometric features we have evaluated the Fast Odometry from Vision (FOVIS) system as an alternative. We provide a comparison between the two approaches where we show a trade off between the reduced drift of the visual odometry approach and the higher local mesh quality of the ICP-based approach. Finally we present ongoing work on incorporating full simultaneous localisation and mapping (SLAM) pose-graph optimisation. We present a new simultaneous localization and mapping SLAM system capable of producing high-quality globally consistent surface reconstructions over hundreds of meters in real time with only a low-cost commodity RGB-D sensor. By using a fused volumetric surface reconstruction we achieve a much higher quality map over what would be achieved using raw RGB-D point clouds. In this paper we highlight three key techniques associated with applying a volumetric fusion-based mapping system to the SLAM problem in real time. First, the use of a GPU-based 3D cyclical buffer trick to efficiently extend dense every-frame volumetric fusion of depth maps to function over an unbounded spatial region. Second, overcoming camera pose estimation limitations in a wide variety of environments by combining both dense geometric and photometric camera pose constraints. Third, efficiently updating the dense map according to place recognition and subsequent loop closure constraints by the use of an 'as-rigid-as-possible' space deformation. We present results on a wide variety of aspects of the system and show through evaluation on de facto standard RGB-D benchmarks that our system performs strongly in terms of trajectory estimation, map quality and computational performance in comparison to other state-of-the-art systems. It is essential for a robot to be able to detect revisits or loop closures for long-term visual navigation. A key insight is that the loop-closing event inherently occurs sparsely, i.e., the image currently being taken matches with only a small subset (if any) of previous observations. Based on this observation, we formulate the problem of loop-closure detection as a sparse, convex 1-minimization problem. By leveraging on fast convex optimization techniques, we are able to efficiently find loop closures, thus enabling real-time robot navigation. This novel formulation requires no offline dictionary learning, as required by most existing approaches, and thus allows online incremental operation. Our approach ensures a global, unique hypothesis by choosing only a single globally optimal match when making a loop-closure decision. Furthermore, the proposed formulation enjoys a flexible representation, with no restriction imposed on how images should be represented, while requiring only that the representations be close to each other when the corresponding images are visually similar. The proposed algorithm is validated extensively using public real-world datasets. This paper describes a new algorithm for cooperative and persistent simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) using multiple robots. Recent pose graph representations have proven very successful for single robot mapping and localization. Among these methods, incremental smoothing and mapping (iSAM) gives an exact incremental solution to the SLAM problem by solving a full nonlinear optimization problem in real-time. In this paper, we present a novel extension to iSAM to facilitate online multi-robot mapping based on multiple pose graphs. Our main contribution is a relative formulation of the relationship between multiple pose graphs that avoids the initialization problem and leads to an efficient solution when compared to a completely global formulation. The relative pose graphs are optimized together to provide a globally consistent multi-robot solution. Efficient access to covariances at any time for relative parameters is provided through iSAM, facilitating data association and loop closing. The performance of the technique is illustrated on various data sets including a publicly available multi-robot data set. Further evaluation is performed in a collaborative helicopter and ground robot experiment. Concentric tube continuum robots provide an infinite-dimensional design space, consisting of individual tube space curves and other tube parameters. Even when design choices are made to restrict the design space to a small number of discrete parameters, ad hoc selection of parameter values to achieve coverage of a desired volume, in the presence of geometric workspace constraints, is essentially impossible - even for experienced researchers. General design algorithms proposed to date have focused on reaching a discrete set of specific points, and have made non-physical approximations in the robot model (most significantly assuming infinite torsional rigidity), to speed up model computation. In this paper, we extend prior algorithms to use more accurate models and incorporate volume-based objectives. These extensions are illustrated in a case study on the design of a concentric tube robot for endonasal pituitary surgery. We show that volume-based design optimization increases the reachable percentage of the surgical workspace by an average of approximately 50 , in comparison to various sets of manually selected design parameters. We conclude that volume-based objectives should be included in future multi-objective design optimization procedures for concentric tube continuum robots. Highlights? Multi-resolution surfel maps as compact RGB-D image representation. ? Maps support rapid extraction from images and fast registration on CPU. ? Object and scene reconstruction through on-line graph optimization of key view poses. ? Real-time object tracking from a wide range of view angles and distances. ? State-of-the-art results of image registration, SLAM, and tracking on benchmark datasets. Building consistent models of objects and scenes from moving sensors is an important prerequisite for many recognition, manipulation, and navigation tasks. Our approach integrates color and depth measurements seamlessly in a multi-resolution map representation. We process image sequences from RGB-D cameras and consider their typical noise properties. In order to align the images, we register view-based maps efficiently on a CPU using multi-resolution strategies. For simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), we determine the motion of the camera by registering maps of key views and optimize the trajectory in a probabilistic framework. We create object models and map indoor scenes using our SLAM approach which includes randomized loop closing to avoid drift. Camera motion relative to the acquired models is then tracked in real-time based on our registration method. We benchmark our method on publicly available RGB-D datasets, demonstrate accuracy, efficiency, and robustness of our method, and compare it with state-of-the-art approaches. We also report on several successful public demonstrations where it was used in mobile manipulation tasks. Artefacts that are present in images taken from a moving rolling shutter camera degrade the accuracy of absolute pose estimation. To alleviate this problem, we introduce an addition linear velocity in the camera projection matrix to approximate the motion of the rolling shutter camera. In particular, we derive a minimal solution using the Grobner Basis that solves for the absolute pose as well as the motion of a rolling shutter camera. We show that the minimal problem requires 5-point correspondences and gives up to 8 real solutions. We also show that our formulation can be extended to use more than 5-point correspondences. We use RANSAC to robustly get all the inliers. In the final step, we relax the linear velocity assumption and do a non-linear refinement on the fuli motion, i.e. linear and angular velocities, and pose of the rolling shutter camera with all the inliers. We verify the feasibility and accuracy of our algorithm with both simulated and real-world datasets. We propose a dense continuous-time tracking and mapping method for RGB-D cameras. We parametrize the camera trajectory using continuous B-splines and optimize the trajectory through dense, direct image alignment. Our method also directly models rolling shutter in both RGB and depth images within the optimization, which improves tracking and reconstruction quality for low-cost CMOS sensors. Using a continuous trajectory representation has a number of advantages over a discrete-time representation (e.g. camera poses at the frame interval). With splines, less variables need to be optimized than with a discrete representation, since the trajectory can be represented with fewer control points than frames. Splines also naturally include smoothness constraints on derivatives of the trajectory estimate. Finally, the continuous trajectory representation allows to compensate for rolling shutter effects, since a pose estimate is available at any exposure time of an image. Our approach demonstrates superior quality in tracking and reconstruction compared to approaches with discrete-time or global shutter assumptions. We present the major advantages of a new 'object oriented' 3D SLAM paradigm, which takes full advantage in the loop of prior knowledge that many scenes consist of repeated, domain-specific objects and structures. As a hand-held depth camera browses a cluttered scene, real-time 3D object recognition and tracking provides 6DoF camera-object constraints which feed into an explicit graph of objects, continually refined by efficient pose-graph optimisation. This offers the descriptive and predictive power of SLAM systems which perform dense surface reconstruction, but with a huge representation compression. The object graph enables predictions for accurate ICP-based camera to model tracking at each live frame, and efficient active search for new objects in currently undescribed image regions. We demonstrate real-time incremental SLAM in large, cluttered environments, including loop closure, relocalisation and the detection of moved objects, and of course the generation of an object level scene description with the potential to enable interaction.