Sanjeev Sharma

Sanjeev Sharma

This paper presents a convex-QCQP based novel path planning algorithm named ellipsoidal constrained agent navigation (ECAN), for a challenging problem of online path planning in completely unknown and unseen continuous environments. ECAN plans path for the agent by making a tunnel of overlapping ellipsoids, in an online fashion, through the environment. Convex constraints in the ellipsoid-formation step circumvent collision with the obstacles. The problem of online-tunneling is solved as a convex-QCQP. This paper assumes no constraints on shape of the agent and the obstacles. However, to make the approach clearer, this paper first introduces the framework for a point-mass agent with point-size obstacles. After explaining the underlying principle in drawing an ellipsoid tunnel, the framework is extended to the agent and obstacles having finite area (2d space) and finite-volume (3d-space).

Sanjeev Sharma, Shaoli Huang, Dacheng Tao

This work addresses the challenging problem of unconstrained 3D hand pose estimation using monocular RGB images. Most of the existing approaches assume some prior knowledge of hand (such as hand locations and side information) is available for 3D hand pose estimation. This restricts their use in unconstrained environments. We, therefore, present an end-to-end framework that robustly predicts hand prior information and accurately infers 3D hand pose by learning ConvNet models while only using keypoint annotations. To achieve robustness, the proposed framework uses a novel keypoint-based method to simultaneously predict hand regions and side labels, unlike existing methods that suffer from background color confusion caused by using segmentation or detection-based technology. Moreover, inspired by the biological structure of the human hand, we introduce two geometric constraints directly into the 3D coordinates prediction that further improves its performance in a weakly-supervised training. Experimental results show that our proposed framework not only performs robustly on unconstrained setting, but also outperforms the state-of-art methods on standard benchmark datasets.

Sanjeev Sharma

On-line motion planning in unknown environments is a challenging problem as it requires (i) ensuring collision avoidance and (ii) minimizing the motion time, while continuously predicting where to go next. Previous approaches to on-line motion planning assume that a rough map of the environment is available, thereby simplifying the problem. This paper presents a reactive on-line motion planner, Robust Autonomous Waypoint generation (RAW), for mobile robots navigating in unknown and unstructured environments. RAW generates a locally maximal ellipsoid around the robot, using semi-definite programming, such that the surrounding obstacles lie outside the ellipsoid. A reinforcement learning agent then generates a local waypoint in the robot's field of view, inside the ellipsoid. The robot navigates to the waypoint and the process iterates until it reaches the goal. By following the waypoints the robot navigates through a sequence of overlapping ellipsoids, and avoids collision. Robot's safety is guaranteed theoretically and the claims are validated through rigorous numerical experiments in four different experimental setups. Near-optimality is shown empirically by comparing RAW trajectories with the global optimal trajectories.

Omprakash Patel, Yogendra P. S. Maravi, Sanjeev Sharma

Histogram Equalization is a contrast enhancement technique in the image processing which uses the histogram of image. However histogram equalization is not the best method for contrast enhancement because the mean brightness of the output image is significantly different from the input image. There are several extensions of histogram equalization has been proposed to overcome the brightness preservation challenge. Contrast enhancement using brightness preserving bi-histogram equalization (BBHE) and Dualistic sub image histogram equalization (DSIHE) which divides the image histogram into two parts based on the input mean and median respectively then equalizes each sub histogram independently. This paper provides review of different popular histogram equalization techniques and experimental study based on the absolute mean brightness error (AMBE), peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR), Structure similarity index (SSI) and Entropy.