This paper presents a new approach for integrating semantic information for vision-based vehicle navigation. Although vision-based vehicle navigation systems using pre-mapped visual landmarks are capable of achieving submeter level accuracy in large-scale urban environment, a typical error source in this type of systems comes from the presence of visual landmarks or features from temporal objects in the environment, such as cars and pedestrians. We propose a gated factor graph framework to use semantic information associated with visual features to make decisions on outlier inlier computation from three perspectives: the feature tracking process, the geo-referenced map building process, and the navigation system using pre-mapped landmarks. The class category that the visual feature belongs to is extracted from a pre-trained deep learning network trained for semantic segmentation. The feasibility and generality of our approach is demonstrated by our implementations on top of two vision-based navigation systems. Experimental evaluations validate that the injection of semantic information associated with visual landmarks using our approach achieves substantial improvements in accuracy on GPS-denied navigation solutions for large-scale urban scenarios
We present an approach for joint inference of 3D scene structure and semantic labeling for monocular video. Starting with monocular image stream, our framework produces a 3D volumetric semantic + occupancy map, which is much more useful than a series of 2D semantic label images or a sparse point cloud produced by traditional semantic segmentation and Structure from Motion(SfM) pipelines respectively. We derive a Conditional Random Field (CRF) model defined in the 3D space, that jointly infers the semantic category and occupancy for each voxel. Such a joint inference in the 3D CRF paves the way for more informed priors and constraints, which is otherwise not possible if solved separately in their traditional frameworks. We make use of class specific semantic cues that constrain the 3D structure in areas, where multiview constraints are weak. Our model comprises of higher order factors, which helps when the depth is unobservable.We also make use of class specific semantic cues to reduce either the degree of such higher order factors, or to approximately model them with unaries if possible. We demonstrate improved 3D structure and temporally consistent semantic segmentation for difficult, large scale, forward moving monocular image sequences. Image based reconstruction of urban environments is a challenging problem that deals with optimization of large number of variables, and has several sources of errors like the presence of dynamic objects. Since most large scale approaches make the assumption of observing static scenes, dynamic objects are relegated to the noise modelling section of such systems. This is an approach of convenience since the RANSAC based framework used to compute most multiview geometric quantities for static scenes naturally confine dynamic objects to the class of outlier measurements. However, reconstructing dynamic objects along with the static environment helps us get a complete picture of an urban environment. Such understanding can then be used for important robotic tasks like path planning for autonomous navigation, obstacle tracking and avoidance, and other areas. In this paper, we propose a system for robust SLAM that works in both static and dynamic environments. To overcome the challenge of dynamic objects in the scene, we propose a new model to incorporate semantic constraints into the reconstruction algorithm. While some of these constraints are based on multi-layered dense CRFs trained over appearance as well as motion cues, other proposed constraints can be expressed as additional terms in the bundle adjustment optimization process that does iterative refinement of 3D structure and camera object motion trajectories. We show results on the challenging KITTI urban dataset for accuracy of motion segmentation and reconstruction of the trajectory and shape of moving objects relative to ground truth. We are able to show average relative error reduction by 41 for moving object trajectory reconstruction relative to state-of-the-art methods like TriTrack[16], as well as on standard bundle adjustment algorithms with motion segmentation.