This content will become publicly available on December 13, 2024
- Award ID(s):
- 1828010
- PAR ID:
- 10514488
- Publisher / Repository:
- IEEE
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- 2023 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)
- ISBN:
- 978-1-6654-9190-7
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 3491 to 3498
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- Detroit, MI, USA
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
null (Ed.)This work describes a monocular visual odometry framework, which exploits the best attributes of edge features for illumination-robust camera tracking, while at the same time ameliorating the performance degradation of edge mapping. In the front-end, an ICP-based edge registration provides robust motion estimation and coarse data association under lighting changes. In the back-end, a novel edge-guided data association pipeline searches for the best photometrically matched points along geometrically possible edges through template matching, so that the matches can be further refined in later bundle adjustment. The core of our proposed data association strategy lies in a point-to-edge geometric uncertainty analysis, which analytically derives (1) a probabilistic search length formula that significantly reduces the search space and (2) a geometric confidence metric for mapping degradation detection based on the predicted depth uncertainty. Moreover, a match confidence based patch size adaption strategy is integrated into our pipeline to reduce matching ambiguity. We present extensive analysis and evaluation of our proposed system on synthetic and real- world benchmark datasets under the influence of illumination changes and large camera motions, where our proposed system outperforms current state-of-art algorithms.more » « less
-
This paper presents a systematic approach on realtime reconstruction of an underwater environment using Sonar, Visual, Inertial, and Depth data. In particular, low lighting conditions, or even complete absence of natural light inside caves, results in strong lighting variations, e.g., the cone of the artificial video light intersecting underwater structures, and the shadow contours. The proposed method utilizes the well defined edges between well lit areas and darkness to provide additional features, resulting into a denser 3D point cloud than the usual point clouds from a Visual SLAM system. Experimental results in an underwater cave at Ginnie Springs, FL, with a custommade underwater sensor suite demonstrate the performance of our system. This will enable more robust navigation of AUVs using the denser 3D point cloud to detect obstacles and achieve higher resolution reconstructions.more » « less
-
In this paper, we meticulously examine the robustness of computer vision object detection frameworks within the intricate realm of real-world traffic scenarios, with a particular emphasis on challenging adverse weather conditions. Conventional evaluation methods often prove inadequate in addressing the complexities inherent in dynamic traffic environments—an increasingly vital consideration as global advancements in autonomous vehicle technologies persist. Our investigation delves specifically into the nuanced performance of these algorithms amidst adverse weather conditions like fog, rain, snow, sun flare, and more, acknowledging the substantial impact of weather dynamics on their precision. Significantly, we seek to underscore that an object detection framework excelling in clear weather may encounter significant challenges in adverse conditions. Our study incorporates in-depth ablation studies on dual modality architectures, exploring a range of applications including traffic monitoring, vehicle tracking, and object tracking. The ultimate goal is to elevate the safety and efficiency of transportation systems, recognizing the pivotal role of robust computer vision systems in shaping the trajectory of future autonomous and intelligent transportation technologies.more » « less
-
Visual terrain-relative navigation (VTRN) is a localization method based on registering a source image taken from a robotic vehicle against a georeferenced target image. With high-resolution imagery databases of Earth and other planets now available, VTRN offers accurate, drift-free navigation for air and space robots even in the absence of external positioning signals. Despite its potential for high accuracy, however, VTRN remains extremely fragile to common and predictable seasonal effects, such as lighting, vegetation changes, and snow cover. Engineered registration algorithms are mature and have provable geometric advantages but cannot accommodate the content changes caused by seasonal effects and have poor matching skill. Approaches based on deep learning can accommodate image content changes but produce opaque position estimates that either lack an interpretable uncertainty or require tedious human annotation. In this work, we address these issues with targeted use of deep learning within an image transform architecture, which converts seasonal imagery to a stable, invariant domain that can be used by conventional algorithms without modification. Our transform preserves the geometric structure and uncertainty estimates of legacy approaches and demonstrates superior performance under extreme seasonal changes while also being easy to train and highly generalizable. We show that classical registration methods perform exceptionally well for robotic visual navigation when stabilized with the proposed architecture and are able to consistently anticipate reliable imagery. Gross mismatches were nearly eliminated in challenging and realistic visual navigation tasks that also included topographic and perspective effects.
-
This paper presents the Brown Pedestrian Odometry Dataset (BPOD) for benchmarking visual odometry algo- rithms on data from head-mounted sensors. This dataset was captured with stereo and RGB streams from RealSense cameras with rolling and global shutters in 12 diverse in- door and outdoor locations on Brown University’s cam- pus. Its associated ground-truth trajectories were gener- ated from third-person videos that documented the recorded pedestrians’ positions relative to stick-on markers placed along their paths. We evaluate the performance of canoni- cal approaches representative of direct, feature-based, and learning-based visual odometry methods on BPOD. Our finding is that current methods which are successful on other benchmarks fail on BPOD. The failure modes cor- respond in part to rapid pedestrian rotation, erratic body movements, etc. We hope this dataset will play a significant role in the identification of these failure modes and in the design, development, and evaluation of pedestrian odome- try algorithms.more » « less