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Miguel Oliveira, Victor Santos, Angel Sappa, P. Dias, & A. Moreira. (2016). Incremental Scenario Representations for Autonomous Driving using Geometric Polygonal Primitives. RAS - Robotics and Autonomous Systems, 83, 312–325.
Abstract: When an autonomous vehicle is traveling through some scenario it receives a continuous stream of sensor data. This sensor data arrives in an asynchronous fashion and often contains overlapping or redundant information. Thus, it is not trivial how a representation of the environment observed by the vehicle can be created and updated over time. This paper presents a novel methodology to compute an incremental 3D representation of a scenario from 3D range measurements. We propose to use macro scale polygonal primitives to model the scenario. This means that the representation of the scene is given as a list of large scale polygons that describe the geometric structure of the environment. Furthermore, we propose mechanisms designed to update the geometric polygonal primitives over time whenever fresh sensor data is collected. Results show that the approach is capable of producing accurate descriptions of the scene, and that it is computationally very efficient when compared to other reconstruction techniques.
Keywords: Incremental scene reconstruction; Point clouds; Autonomous vehicles; Polygonal primitives
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Angel Sappa, P. Carvajal, Cristhian A. Aguilera-Carrasco, Miguel Oliveira, Dennis Romero, & Boris X. Vintimilla. (2016). Wavelet based visible and infrared image fusion: a comparative study. SENS - Sensors, 16(6), 1–15.
Abstract: This paper evaluates different wavelet-based cross-spectral image fusion strategies adopted to merge visible and infrared images. The objective is to find the best setup independently of the evaluation metric used to measure the performance. Quantitative performance results are obtained with state of the art approaches together with adaptations proposed in the current work. The options evaluated in the current work result from the combination of different setups in the wavelet image decomposition stage together with different fusion strategies for the final merging stage that generates the resulting representation. Most of the approaches evaluate results according to the application for which they are intended for. Sometimes a human observer is selected to judge the quality of the obtained results. In the current work, quantitative values are considered in order to find correlations between setups and performance of obtained results; these correlations can be used to define a criteria for selecting the best fusion strategy for a given pair of cross-spectral images. The whole procedure is evaluated with a large set of correctly registered visible and infrared image pairs, including both Near InfraRed (NIR) and Long Wave InfraRed (LWIR).
Keywords: Image fusion; fusion evaluation metrics; visible and infrared imaging; discrete wavelet transform
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Angel Sappa, Cristhian A. Aguilera-Carrasco, Juan A. Carvajal Ayala, Miguel Oliveira, Dennis Romero, Boris X. Vintimilla, et al. (2016). Monocular visual odometry: A cross-spectral image fusion based approach. RAS - Robotics and Autonomous Systems, 85, 26–36.
Abstract: This manuscript evaluates the usage of fused cross-spectral images in a monocular visual odometry approach. Fused images are obtained through a Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) scheme, where the best setup is empirically obtained by means of a mutual information based evaluation metric. The objective is to have a flexible scheme where fusion parameters are adapted according to the characteristics of the given images. Visual odometry is computed from the fused monocular images using an off the shelf approach. Experimental results using data sets obtained with two different platforms are presented. Additionally, comparison with a previous approach as well as with monocular-visible/infrared spectra are also provided showing the advantages of the proposed scheme.
Keywords: Monocular visual odometry; LWIR-RGB cross-spectral imaging; Image fusion
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Miguel Oliveira, Victor Santos, Angel Sappa, P. Dias, & A. Moreira. (2016). Incremental texture mapping for autonomous driving. RAS - Robotics and Autonomous Systems, 84, 113–128.
Abstract: Autonomous vehicles have a large number of on-board sensors, not only for providing coverage all around the vehicle, but also to ensure multi-modality in the observation of the scene. Because of this, it is not trivial to come up with a single, unique representation that feeds from the data given by all these sensors. We propose an algorithm which is capable of mapping texture collected from vision based sensors onto a geometric description of the scenario constructed from data provided by 3D sensors. The algorithm uses a constrained Delaunay triangulation to produce a mesh which is updated using a specially devised sequence of operations. These enforce a partial configuration of the mesh that avoids bad quality textures and ensures that there are no gaps in the texture. Results show that this algorithm is capable of producing fine quality textures.
Keywords: Scene reconstruction; Autonomous driving; Texture mapping
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Cristhian A. Aguilera-Carrasco, Angel Sappa, Cristhian Aguilera, & Ricardo Toledo. (2017). Cross-Spectral Local Descriptors via Quadruplet Network. SENS - Sensors, 17(4), 873.
Abstract: This paper presents a novel CNN-based architecture, referred to as Q-Net, to learn local feature descriptors that are useful for matching image patches from two different spectral bands. Given correctly matched and non-matching cross-spectral image pairs, a quadruplet network is trained to map input image patches to a common Euclidean space, regardless of the input spectral band. Our approach is inspired by the recent success of triplet networks in the visible spectrum, but adapted for cross-spectral scenarios, where, for each matching pair, there are always two possible non-matching patches: one for each spectrum. Experimental evaluations on a public cross-spectral VIS-NIR dataset shows that the proposed approach improves the state-of-the-art. Moreover, the proposed technique can also be used in mono-spectral settings, obtaining a similar performance to triplet network descriptors, but requiring less training data.
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