Simone Fontana

Matteo Vaghi, Augusto Luis Ballardini, Simone Fontana et al.

Camera localization, i.e., camera pose regression, represents an important task in computer vision since it has many practical applications such as in the context of intelligent vehicles and their localization. Having reliable estimates of the regression uncertainties is also important, as it would allow us to catch dangerous localization failures. In the literature, uncertainty estimation in Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) is often performed through sampling methods, such as Monte Carlo Dropout (MCD) and Deep Ensemble (DE), at the expense of undesirable execution time or an increase in hardware resources. In this work, we considered an uncertainty estimation approach named Deep Evidential Regression (DER) that avoids any sampling technique, providing direct uncertainty estimates. Our goal is to provide a systematic approach to intercept localization failures of camera localization systems based on DNNs architectures, by analyzing the generated uncertainties. We propose to exploit CMRNet, a DNN approach for multi-modal image to LiDAR map registration, by modifying its internal configuration to allow for extensive experimental activity on the KITTI dataset. The experimental section highlights CMRNet's major flaws and proves that our proposal does not compromise the original localization performances but also provides, at the same time, the necessary introspection measures that would allow end-users to act accordingly.

Augusto Luis Ballardini, Simone Fontana, Axel Furlan et al.

Laser scanners are sensors of widespread use in robotic applications. Under the Robot Operating System (ROS) the information generated by laser scanners can be conveyed by either LaserScan messages or in the form of PointClouds. Many publicly available algorithms (mapping, localization, navigation, etc.) rely on LaserScan messages, yet a tool for handling multiple lasers, merging their measurements, or to generate generic LaserScan messages from PointClouds, is not available. This report describes two tools, in the form of ROS nodes, which we release as open source under the BSD license, which allow to either merge multiple single-plane laser scans or to generate virtual laser scans from a point cloud. A short tutorial, along with the main advantages and limitations of these tools are presented.

Simone Fontana, Domenico G. Sorrenti

Probabilistic Point Clouds Registration (PPCR) is an algorithm that, in its multi-iteration version, outperformed state of the art algorithms for local point clouds registration. However, its performances have been tested using a fixed high number of iterations. To be of practical usefulness, we think that the algorithm should decide by itself when to stop, to avoid an excessive number of iterations and, therefore, wasting computational time. With this work, we compare different termination criterion on several datasets and prove that the chosen one produce very good results that are comparable to those obtained using a very high number of iterations while saving computational time.

Simone Fontana, Daniele Cattaneo, Augusto Luis Ballardini et al.

Point clouds registration is a fundamental step of many point clouds processing pipelines; however, most algorithms are tested on data that are collected ad-hoc and not shared with the research community. These data often cover only a very limited set of use cases; therefore, the results cannot be generalised. Public datasets proposed until now, taken individually, cover only a few kinds of environment and mostly a single sensor. For these reasons, we developed a benchmark, for localization and mapping applications, using multiple publicly available datasets. In this way, we are able to cover many kinds of environment and many kinds of sensor that can produce point clouds. Furthermore, the ground truth has been thoroughly inspected and evaluated to ensure its quality. For some of the datasets, the accuracy of the ground truth measuring system was not reported by the original authors, therefore we estimated it with our own novel method, based on an iterative registration algorithm. Along with the data, we provide a broad set of registration problems, chosen to cover different types of initial misalignment, various degrees of overlap, and different kinds of registration problems. Lastly, we propose a metric to measure the performances of registration algorithms: it combines the commonly used rotation and translation errors together, to allow an objective comparison of the alignments. This work aims at encouraging authors to use a public and shared benchmark, instead of data collected ad-hoc, to ensure objectivity and repeatability, two fundamental characteristics in any scientific field.

Daniele Cattaneo, Matteo Vaghi, Simone Fontana et al.

Global localization is an important and widely studied problem for many robotic applications. Place recognition approaches can be exploited to solve this task, e.g., in the autonomous driving field. While most vision-based approaches match an image w.r.t. an image database, global visual localization within LiDAR-maps remains fairly unexplored, even though the path toward high definition 3D maps, produced mainly from LiDARs, is clear. In this work we leverage Deep Neural Network (DNN) approaches to create a shared embedding space between images and LiDAR-maps, allowing for image to 3D-LiDAR place recognition. We trained a 2D and a 3D DNN that create embeddings, respectively from images and from point clouds, that are close to each other whether they refer to the same place. An extensive experimental activity is presented to assess the effectiveness of the approach w.r.t. different learning paradigms, network architectures, and loss functions. All the evaluations have been performed using the Oxford Robotcar Dataset, which encompasses a wide range of weather and light conditions.

Daniele Cattaneo, Matteo Vaghi, Augusto Luis Ballardini et al.

In this paper we present CMRNet, a realtime approach based on a Convolutional Neural Network to localize an RGB image of a scene in a map built from LiDAR data. Our network is not trained in the working area, i.e. CMRNet does not learn the map. Instead it learns to match an image to the map. We validate our approach on the KITTI dataset, processing each frame independently without any tracking procedure. CMRNet achieves 0.27m and 1.07deg median localization accuracy on the sequence 00 of the odometry dataset, starting from a rough pose estimate displaced up to 3.5m and 17deg. To the best of our knowledge this is the first CNN-based approach that learns to match images from a monocular camera to a given, preexisting 3D LiDAR-map.