33 accepted papers
Semantic Scene Completion (SSC) is a task that simultaneously predicts the occupancy and semantic labels of the environment. Compared with separate processing, SSC leverages the coupled nature of scene completion and semantic segmentation. Although this multitask integration can utilize complementar
Conventionally, human intuition defines <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">vision</i> as a modality of <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">passive</i> optical sensing, relying
In this paper, we propose Binarized Change Detection (BiCD), the first binary neural network (BNN) designed specifically for change detection. Conventional network binarization approaches, which directly quantize both weights and activations in change detection models, severely limit the network's a…
Freespace detection plays an important role in autonomous driving. In recent years, deep learning based freespace detection methods have performed well in urban scenes. However, for off-road scenes, freespace detection poses significant challenges due to the complexity of the scenes and the lack of
A prior global topological map (e.g., the OpenStreetMap, OSM) can boost the performance of autonomous mapping by a ground mobile robot. However, the prior map is usually incomplete due to lacking labeling in partial paths. To solve this problem, this paper proposes an OSM maker using airborne sensor
This letter presents REACTER, a perception-informed tracking framework that enables quadrotors to track moving targets safely and adaptively without occlusion in cluttered environments. The core idea of the proposed approach is to dynamically adjust the tracking distance and observation angle based
The autonomous mapping of large-scale urban scenes presents significant challenges for autonomous robots. To mitigate the challenges, global planning, such as utilizing prior GPS trajectories from OpenStreetMap (OSM), is often used to guide the autonomous navigation of robots for mapping. However, d…
Conventional LiDAR-inertial odometry (LIO) or SLAM methods heavily rely on geometric features of environments, as LiDARs primarily provide range measurements instead of motion measurements. From now on, however, the situation changes thanks to the novel Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave (FMCW) LiD
Robust initialization is crucial for online systems. In the letter, a high-frequency and resilient initialization framework is designed for LiDAR-inertial systems, leveraging both inertial sensors and Doppler LiDAR. The innovative FMCW Doppler LiDAR opens up a novel avenue for robotic sensing by cap
Vision-aided localization for low-cost mobile robots in diverse environments has attracted widespread attention recently. Although many current systems are applicable in daytime environments, nocturnal visual localization is still an open problem owing to the lack of stable visual information. An in…
Anomaly detection is critical in surveillance systems and patrol robots by identifying anomalous regions in images for early warning. Depending on whether reference data are utilized, anomaly detection can be categorized into anomaly detection with reference and anomaly detection without reference.…
As a part of the perception results of intelligent driving systems, static object detection (SOD) in 3D space provides crucial cues for driving environment understanding. With the rapid deployment of deep neural networks for SOD tasks, the demand for high-quality training samples soars. The traditio…
Existing RRT-based exploration methods often suffer from interruptions in the exploration process due to the inability to detect all frontiers of the drivable area in the mapping map. These methods cannot detect all frontiers because the RRT expansion is disturbed by factors such as RRT preset param
Most of the existing moving object segmentation (MOS) methods regard MOS as an independent task, in this paper, we associate the MOS task with semantic segmentation, and propose a semantics-guided network for moving object segmentation (LiDAR-SGMOS). We first transform the range image and semantic f…
In the point-cloud-based place recognition area, the existing hybrid architectures combining both convolutional networks and transformers have shown promising performance. They mainly apply the voxel-wise transformer after the sparse convolution (SPConv). However, they can induce information loss by
In this paper, we propose an efficient frontier detector method based on adaptive Rapidly-exploring Random Tree (RRT) for autonomous robot exploration. Robots can achieve real-time incremental frontier detection when they are exploring unknown environments. First, our detector adaptively adjusts the…
Place recognition or loop closure detection is one of the core components in a full SLAM system. In this paper, aiming at strengthening the relevancy of local neighboring points and the contextual dependency among global points simultaneously, we investigate the exploitation of transformer-based net…
In this paper, we propose a learning-based moving-object tracking method utilizing the newly developed LiDAR sensor, Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave (FMCW) LiDAR. Compared with most existing commercial LiDAR sensors, FMCW LiDAR can provide additional Doppler velocity information to each 3D point…
Most of the existing road detection methods are either single-modal based, e.g., based on LiDAR or camera, or multi-modal based with LiDAR-camera fusion. The algorithms are designed for a specific data type, and cannot cope with input data changes. In addition, the LiDAR-camera based methods can onl…
Camera motion estimation, such as relative pose estimation and absolute pose estimation, are fundamental problems in computer vision and robotics. To obtain the motion parameters, classical methods rely on studying the properties of the geometric matrices, e.g., rotation matrix, essential matrix, ho…
Cracks are irregular line structures that are of interest in many computer vision applications. Crack detection (e.g., from pavement images) is a challenging task due to intensity in-homogeneity, topology complexity, low contrast and noisy background. The overall crack detection accuracy can be sign…
Smartphones, tablets and camera systems used, e.g., in cars and UAVs, are typically equipped with IMUs (inertial measurement units) that can measure the gravity vector accurately. Using this additional information, the y-axes of the cameras can be aligned, reducing their relative orientation to a si…
In this paper, we propose an efficient solution to the calibrated camera motion estimation with a common direction. This case is relevant to smart phones, tablets, and other camera-IMU (Inertial measurement unit) systems, which have accelerometers to measure the gravity direction. We can align one o…
In this paper, we propose a cascaded non-local neural network for point cloud segmentation. The proposed network aims to build the long-range dependencies of point clouds for the accurate segmentation. Specifically, we develop a novel cascaded non-local module, which consists of the neighborhood-lev…
We propose an integrated approach to active exploration by exploiting the Cartographer method as the base SLAM module for submap creation and performing efficient frontier detection in the geometrically co-aligned submaps induced by graph optimization. We also carry out analysis on the reachability…
In this paper, a global descriptor for a LiDAR point cloud, called LiDAR Iris, is proposed for fast and accurate loop-closure detection. A binary signature image can be obtained for each point cloud after several LoG-Gabor filtering and thresholding operations on the LiDAR-Iris image representation.…
We propose minimal solutions to relative pose estimation problem from two views sharing a common direction with unknown focal length. This is relevant for cameras equipped with an IMU (inertial measurement unit), e.g., smart phones, tablets. Similar to the 6-point algorithm for two cameras with unkn…
In this paper, we propose a novel approach to two-view minimal-case relative pose problems based on homography with a common reference direction. We explore the rank-1 constraint on the difference between the Euclidean homography matrix and the corresponding rotation, and propose an efficient two-st…
In this work, we propose a novel paradigm to design a hybrid thermal/EO (Electro-Optical or visible-light) camera, whose thermal and RGB frames are pixel-wisely aligned and temporally synchronized. Compared with the existing schemes, we innovate in three ways in order to make it more compact in dime…
In this paper, we propose a road detection method with LiDAR-camera fusion in a novel conditional random field (CRF) framework to exploit both range and color information. In the LiDAR based part, a fast height-difference based scanning strategy is applied in the 2D LiDAR range-image domain and a de…
In this paper, we propose a two-view fusion based convolutional neural network to estimate road areas in urban environments with LiDAR point clouds as input only. The proposed network takes two transformed LiDAR data representations, the LiDAR imageries and the camera-perspective maps, as inputs. It…
This paper proposes a new method for detecting a road from a stereo pair of images. First, the horizon is accurately estimated by a robust, weighted-sampling RANSAC-like method in the improved v-disparity map. The vanishing point of the road region is located using both the horizon information and r…
Detection of traversable road regions, positive and negative obstacles, and water hazards is a fundamental task for autonomous driving vehicles, especially in off-road environment. This paper proposes an efficient method, called Lidar-histogram. It can be used to integrate the detection of traversab…