BSH-Det3D: Improving 3D Object Detection with BEV Shape Heatmap

The progress of LiDAR-based 3D object detection has significantly enhanced developments in autonomous driving and robotics. However, due to the limitations of LiDAR sensors, object shapes suffer from deterioration in occluded and distant areas, which creates a fundamental challenge to 3D perception. Existing methods estimate specific 3D shapes and achieve remarkable performance. However, these methods rely on extensive computation and memory, causing imbalances between accuracy and real-time performance. To tackle this challenge, we propose a novel LiDAR-based 3D object detection model named BSH-Det3D, which applies an effective way to enhance spatial features by estimating complete shapes from a bird's eye view (BEV). Specifically, we design the Pillar-based Shape Completion (PSC) module to predict the probability of occupancy whether a pillar contains object shapes. The PSC module generates a BEV shape heatmap for each scene. After integrating with heatmaps, BSH-Det3D can provide additional information in shape deterioration areas and generate high-quality 3D proposals. We also design an attention-based densification fusion module (ADF) to adaptively associate the sparse features with heatmaps and raw points. The ADF module integrates the advantages of points and shapes knowledge with negligible overheads. Extensive experiments on the KITTI benchmark achieve state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in terms of accuracy and speed, demonstrating the efficiency and flexibility of BSH-Det3D. The source code is available on https://github.com/mystorm16/BSH-Det3D.

DYP-SLAM: A Real-time Visual SLAM Based on YOLO and Probability in Dynamic Environments

SLAM algorithm is based on the static assumption of environment. Therefore, the dynamic factors in the environment will have a great impact on the matching points due to violating this assumption, and then directly affect the accuracy of subsequent camera pose estimation. Recently, some related works generally use the combination of semantic constraints and geometric constraints to deal with dynamic objects, but there are some problems, such as poor real-time performance, easy to treat people as rigid bodies, and poor performance in low dynamic scenes. In this paper, a dynamic scene oriented visual SLAM algorithm based on target detection and static probability named DYP-SLAM is proposed. The algorithm combines semantic constraints and geometric constraints to calculate the static probability of objects, keypoints and map points, and takes them as weights to participate in camera pose estimation. The proposed algorithm is evaluated on the public dataset and compared with a variety of advanced algorithms. It has achieved the best results in almost all low dynamics and high dynamic scenarios, and showing quite high real-time.

Accurate and Robust Object-oriented SLAM with 3D Quadric Landmark Construction in Outdoor Environment

Object-oriented SLAM is a popular technology in autonomous driving and robotics. In this paper, we propose a stereo visual SLAM with a robust quadric landmark representation method. The system consists of four components, including deep learning detection, object-oriented data association, dual quadric landmark initialization and object-based pose optimization. State-of-the-art quadric-based SLAM algorithms always face observation related problems and are sensitive to observation noise, which limits their application in outdoor scenes. To solve this problem, we propose a quadric initialization method based on the decoupling of the quadric parameters method, which improves the robustness to observation noise. The sufficient object data association algorithm and object-oriented optimization with multiple cues enables a highly accurate object pose estimation that is robust to local observations. Experimental results show that the proposed system is more robust to observation noise and significantly outperforms current state-of-the-art methods in outdoor environments. In addition, the proposed system demonstrates real-time performance.

Accurate and Robust Scale Recovery for Monocular Visual Odometry Based on Plane Geometry

Scale ambiguity is a fundamental problem in monocular visual odometry. Typical solutions include loop closure detection and environment information mining. For applications like self-driving cars, loop closure is not always available, hence mining prior knowledge from the environment becomes a more promising approach. In this paper, with the assumption of a constant height of the camera above the ground, we develop a light-weight scale recovery framework leveraging an accurate and robust estimation of the ground plane. The framework includes a ground point extraction algorithm for selecting high-quality points on the ground plane, and a ground point aggregation algorithm for joining the extracted ground points in a local sliding window. Based on the aggregated data, the scale is finally recovered by solving a least-squares problem using a RANSAC-based optimizer. Sufficient data and robust optimizer enable a highly accurate scale recovery. Experiments on the KITTI dataset show that the proposed framework can achieve state-of-the-art accuracy in terms of translation errors, while maintaining competitive performance on the rotation error. Due to the light-weight design, our framework also demonstrates a high frequency of 20Hz on the dataset.

Event-VPR: End-to-End Weakly Supervised Network Architecture for Event-based Visual Place Recognition

Traditional visual place recognition (VPR) methods generally use frame-based cameras, which is easy to fail due to dramatic illumination changes or fast motions. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end visual place recognition network for event cameras, which can achieve good place recognition performance in challenging environments. The key idea of the proposed algorithm is firstly to characterize the event streams with the EST voxel grid, then extract features using a convolution network, and finally aggregate features using an improved VLAD network to realize end-to-end visual place recognition using event streams. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, we compare the proposed method with classical VPR methods on the event-based driving datasets (MVSEC, DDD17) and the synthetic datasets (Oxford RobotCar). Experimental results show that the proposed method can achieve much better performance in challenging scenarios. To our knowledge, this is the first end-to-end event-based VPR method. The accompanying source code is available at https://github.com/kongdelei/Event-VPR.

EAO-SLAM: Monocular Semi-Dense Object SLAM Based on Ensemble Data Association

Object-level data association and pose estimation play a fundamental role in semantic SLAM, which remain unsolved due to the lack of robust and accurate algorithms. In this work, we propose an ensemble data associate strategy to integrate the parametric and nonparametric statistic tests. By exploiting the nature of different statistics, our method can effectively aggregate the information of different measurements, and thus significantly improve the robustness and accuracy of the association process. We then present an accurate object pose estimation framework, in which an outlier-robust centroid and scale estimation algorithm and an object pose initialization algorithm are developed to help improve the optimality of the estimated results. Furthermore, we build a SLAM system that can generate semi-dense or lightweight object-oriented maps with a monocular camera. Extensive experiments are conducted on three publicly available datasets and a real scenario. The results show that our approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art techniques in accuracy and robustness.

PRED18: Dataset and Further Experiments with DAVIS Event Camera in Predator-Prey Robot Chasing

Machine vision systems using convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for robotic applications are increasingly being developed. Conventional vision CNNs are driven by camera frames at constant sample rate, thus achieving a fixed latency and power consumption tradeoff. This paper describes further work on the first experiments of a closed-loop robotic system integrating a CNN together with a Dynamic and Active Pixel Vision Sensor (DAVIS) in a predator/prey scenario. The DAVIS, mounted on the predator Summit XL robot, produces frames at a fixed 15 Hz frame-rate and Dynamic Vision Sensor (DVS) histograms containing 5k ON and OFF events at a variable frame-rate ranging from 15-500 Hz depending on the robot speeds. In contrast to conventional frame-based systems, the latency and processing cost depends on the rate of change of the image. The CNN is trained offline on the 1.25h labeled dataset to recognize the position and size of the prey robot, in the field of view of the predator. During inference, combining the ten output classes of the CNN allows extracting the analog position vector of the prey relative to the predator with a mean 8.7% error in angular estimation. The system is compatible with conventional deep learning technology, but achieves a variable latency-power tradeoff that adapts automatically to the dynamics. Finally, investigations on the robustness of the algorithm, a human performance comparison and a deconvolution analysis are also explored.

Steering a Predator Robot using a Mixed Frame/Event-Driven Convolutional Neural Network

This paper describes the application of a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) in the context of a predator/prey scenario. The CNN is trained and run on data from a Dynamic and Active Pixel Sensor (DAVIS) mounted on a Summit XL robot (the predator), which follows another one (the prey). The CNN is driven by both conventional image frames and dynamic vision sensor "frames" that consist of a constant number of DAVIS ON and OFF events. The network is thus "data driven" at a sample rate proportional to the scene activity, so the effective sample rate varies from 15 Hz to 240 Hz depending on the robot speeds. The network generates four outputs: steer right, left, center and non-visible. After off-line training on labeled data, the network is imported on the on-board Summit XL robot which runs jAER and receives steering directions in real time. Successful results on closed-loop trials, with accuracies up to 87% or 92% (depending on evaluation criteria) are reported. Although the proposed approach discards the precise DAVIS event timing, it offers the significant advantage of compatibility with conventional deep learning technology without giving up the advantage of data-driven computing.