Semantic mapping is the incremental process of “mapping” relevant information of the world (i.e., spatial information, temporal events, agents and actions) to a formal description supported by a reasoning engine. Current research focuses on learning the semantic of environments based on their spatial location, geometry and appearance. Many methods to tackle this problem have been proposed, but the lack of a uniform representation, as well as standard benchmarking suites, prevents their direct comparison. In this paper, we propose a standardization in the representation of semantic maps, by defining an easily extensible formalism to be used on top of metric maps of the environments. Based on this, we describe the procedure to build a dataset (based on real sensor data) for benchmarking semantic mapping techniques, also hypothesizing some possible evaluation metrics. Nevertheless, by providing a tool for the construction of a semantic map ground truth, we aim at the contribution of the scientific community in acquiring data for populating the dataset.
The other problem, which emerges as a consequence of the variety of representations, is the absence of a standard suitable validation and evaluation procedure. In addition to previous examples, Zender @cite_16 generate a representation ranging from sensor-based maps to a conceptual abstraction, encoded in an OWL-DL ontology of an indoor office environment. However, except for individual modules, their experimental evaluation is mainly qualitative. Pronobis and Jensfelt @cite_7 , instead, represent a conceptual map as a probabilistic chain graph model and evaluate their method by comparing the robot belief to be in a certain location against the ground truth. Gunther @cite_10 perform a sort of semantic aided object classification based on an OWL-DL knowledge base. The evaluation is based on the rate of correctly classified objects. Finally, Handa @cite_8 propose a synthetic dataset, which could be eventually extended with semantic knowledge and used as a ground truth for comparing semantic mapping methods. However, even when noise is introduced, fictitious data never reflect a real world acquisition.
@cite_16 @cite_10 @cite_7 @cite_8
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We present an approach for creating conceptual representations of human-made indoor environments using mobile robots. The concepts refer to spatial and functional properties of typical indoor environments. Following different findings in spatial cognition, our model is composed of layers representing maps at different levels of abstraction. The complete system is integrated in a mobile robot endowed with laser and vision sensors for place and object recognition. The system also incorporates a linguistic framework that actively supports the map acquisition process, and which is used for situated dialogue. Finally, we discuss the capabilities of the integrated system. We present an approach to create a semantic map of an indoor environment, based on a series of 3D point clouds captured by a mobile robot using a Kinect camera. The proposed system reconstructs the surfaces in the point clouds, detects different types of furniture and estimates their poses. The result is a consistent mesh representation of the environment enriched by CAD models corresponding to the detected pieces of furniture. We evaluate our approach on two datasets totaling over 800 frames directly on each individual frame. This paper presents a probabilistic framework combining heterogeneous, uncertain, information such as object observations, shape, size, appearance of rooms and human input for semantic mapping. It abstracts multi-modal sensory information and integrates it with conceptual common-sense knowledge in a fully probabilistic fashion. It relies on the concept of spatial properties which make the semantic map more descriptive, and the system more scalable and better adapted for human interaction. A probabilistic graphical model, a chaingraph, is used to represent the conceptual information and perform spatial reasoning. Experimental results from online system tests in a large unstructured office environment highlight the system's ability to infer semantic room categories, predict existence of objects and values of other spatial properties as well as reason about unexplored space. We introduce the Imperial College London and National University of Ireland Maynooth (ICL-NUIM) dataset for the evaluation of visual odometry, 3D reconstruction and SLAM algorithms that typically use RGB-D data. We present a collection of handheld RGB-D camera sequences within synthetically generated environments. RGB-D sequences with perfect ground truth poses are provided as well as a ground truth surface model that enables a method of quantitatively evaluating the final map or surface reconstruction accuracy. Care has been taken to simulate typically observed real-world artefacts in the synthetic imagery by modelling sensor noise in both RGB and depth data. While this dataset is useful for the evaluation of visual odometry and SLAM trajectory estimation, our main focus is on providing a method to benchmark the surface reconstruction accuracy which to date has been missing in the RGB-D community despite the plethora of ground truth RGB-D datasets available.