Abstract: This paper presents a new technique to the instantaneous 3D motion estimation. The main contributions are as follows. First, we show that the 3D camera or scene velocity can be retrieved from image derivatives only assuming that the scene contains a dominant plane. Second, we propose a new robust algorithm that simultaneously provides the Least Trimmed Square solution and the percentage of inliers-the non-contaminated data. Experiments on both synthetic and real image sequences demonstrated the effectiveness of the developed method. Those experiments show that the new robust approach can outperform classical robust schemes.

Abstract: This paper presents a direct and stochastic technique for real-time estimation of on-board stereo head’s position and orientation. Unlike existing works which rely on feature extraction either in the image domain or in 3D space, our proposed approach directly estimates the unknown parameters from the stream of stereo pairs’ brightness. The pose parameters are tracked using the particle filtering framework which implicitly enforces the smoothness constraints on the estimated parameters. The proposed technique can be used with a driver assistance applications as well as with augmented reality applications. Extended experiments on urban environments with different road geometries are presented. Comparisons with a 3D data-based approach are presented. Moreover, we provide a performance study aiming at evaluating the accuracy of the proposed approach.

Abstract: This paper presents a comparative study of three different strategies to improve the performance of particle filters, in the context of visual contour tracking: the unscented particle filter, the Rao-Blackwellized particle filter, and the partitioned sampling technique. The tracking problem analyzed is the joint estimation of the global and local transformation of the outline of a given target, represented following the active shape model approach. The main contributions of the paper are the novel adaptations of the considered techniques on this generic problem, and the quantitative assessment of their performance in extensive experimental work done.

Abstract: Ground-truth data is essential for the objective evaluation of object detection methods in computer vision. Many works claim their method is robust but they support it with experiments which are not quantitatively assessed with regard some ground-truth. This is one of the main obstacles to properly evaluate and compare such methods. One of the main reasons is that creating an extensive and representative ground-truth is very time consuming, specially in the case of video sequences, where thousands of frames have to be labelled. Could such a ground-truth be generated, at least in part, automatically? Though it may seem a contradictory question, we show that this is possible for the case of video sequences recorded from a moving camera. The key idea is transferring existing frame segmentations from a reference sequence into another video sequence recorded at a different time on the same track, possibly under a different ambient lighting. We have carried out experiments on several video sequence pairs and quantitatively assessed the precision of the transformed ground-truth, which prove that our approach is not only feasible but also quite accurate.

Abstract: This paper presents a vision-based approach for mobile robot localization. The model of the environment is topological. The new approach characterizes a place using a signature. This signature consists of a constellation of descriptors computed over different types of local affine covariant regions extracted from an omnidirectional image acquired rotating a standard camera with a pan-tilt unit. This type of representation permits a reliable and distinctive environment modelling. Our objectives were to validate the proposed method in indoor environments and, also, to find out if the combination of complementary local feature region detectors improves the localization versus using a single region detector. Our experimental results show that if false matches are effectively rejected, the combination of different covariant affine region detectors increases notably the performance of the approach by combining the different strengths of the individual detectors. In order to reduce the localization time, two strategies are evaluated: re-ranking the map nodes using a global similarity measure and using standard perspective view field of 45°.
In order to systematically test topological localization methods, another contribution proposed in this work is a novel method to see the degradation in localization performance as the robot moves away from the point where the original signature was acquired. This allows to know the robustness of the proposed signature. In order for this to be effective, it must be done in several, variated, environments that test all the possible situations in which the robot may have to perform localization.

Abstract: An autonomous mobile robot must face the correspondence or data association problem in order to carry out tasks like place recognition or unknown environment mapping. In order to put into correspondence two maps, most methods estimate the transformation relating the maps from matches established between low level feature extracted from sensor data. However, finding explicit matches between features is a challenging and computationally expensive task. In this paper, we propose a new method to align obstacle maps without searching explicit matches between features. The maps are obtained from a stereo pair. Then, we use a vocabulary tree approach to identify putative corresponding maps followed by the Newton minimization algorithm to find the transformation that relates both maps. The proposed method is evaluated in a typical office environment showing good performance.