Sonya Coleman

You Shen, Yunzhou Zhang, Yanmin Wu et al. · pku

The progress of LiDAR-based 3D object detection has significantly enhanced developments in autonomous driving and robotics. However, due to the limitations of LiDAR sensors, object shapes suffer from deterioration in occluded and distant areas, which creates a fundamental challenge to 3D perception. Existing methods estimate specific 3D shapes and achieve remarkable performance. However, these methods rely on extensive computation and memory, causing imbalances between accuracy and real-time performance. To tackle this challenge, we propose a novel LiDAR-based 3D object detection model named BSH-Det3D, which applies an effective way to enhance spatial features by estimating complete shapes from a bird's eye view (BEV). Specifically, we design the Pillar-based Shape Completion (PSC) module to predict the probability of occupancy whether a pillar contains object shapes. The PSC module generates a BEV shape heatmap for each scene. After integrating with heatmaps, BSH-Det3D can provide additional information in shape deterioration areas and generate high-quality 3D proposals. We also design an attention-based densification fusion module (ADF) to adaptively associate the sparse features with heatmaps and raw points. The ADF module integrates the advantages of points and shapes knowledge with negligible overheads. Extensive experiments on the KITTI benchmark achieve state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in terms of accuracy and speed, demonstrating the efficiency and flexibility of BSH-Det3D. The source code is available on https://github.com/mystorm16/BSH-Det3D.

Delei Kong, Zheng Fang, Haojia Li et al.

Traditional visual place recognition (VPR) methods generally use frame-based cameras, which is easy to fail due to dramatic illumination changes or fast motions. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end visual place recognition network for event cameras, which can achieve good place recognition performance in challenging environments. The key idea of the proposed algorithm is firstly to characterize the event streams with the EST voxel grid, then extract features using a convolution network, and finally aggregate features using an improved VLAD network to realize end-to-end visual place recognition using event streams. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, we compare the proposed method with classical VPR methods on the event-based driving datasets (MVSEC, DDD17) and the synthetic datasets (Oxford RobotCar). Experimental results show that the proposed method can achieve much better performance in challenging scenarios. To our knowledge, this is the first end-to-end event-based VPR method. The accompanying source code is available at https://github.com/kongdelei/Event-VPR.

Yanmin Wu, Yunzhou Zhang, Delong Zhu et al.

Object-level data association and pose estimation play a fundamental role in semantic SLAM, which remain unsolved due to the lack of robust and accurate algorithms. In this work, we propose an ensemble data associate strategy for integrating the parametric and nonparametric statistic tests. By exploiting the nature of different statistics, our method can effectively aggregate the information of different measurements, and thus significantly improve the robustness and accuracy of data association. We then present an accurate object pose estimation framework, in which an outliers-robust centroid and scale estimation algorithm and an object pose initialization algorithm are developed to help improve the optimality of pose estimation results. Furthermore, we build a SLAM system that can generate semi-dense or lightweight object-oriented maps with a monocular camera. Extensive experiments are conducted on three publicly available datasets and a real scenario. The results show that our approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art techniques in accuracy and robustness. The source code is available on: https://github.com/yanmin-wu/EAO-SLAM.

Rui Tian, Yunzhou Zhang, Yonghui Feng et al.

Object-oriented SLAM is a popular technology in autonomous driving and robotics. In this paper, we propose a stereo visual SLAM with a robust quadric landmark representation method. The system consists of four components, including deep learning detection, object-oriented data association, dual quadric landmark initialization and object-based pose optimization. State-of-the-art quadric-based SLAM algorithms always face observation related problems and are sensitive to observation noise, which limits their application in outdoor scenes. To solve this problem, we propose a quadric initialization method based on the decoupling of the quadric parameters method, which improves the robustness to observation noise. The sufficient object data association algorithm and object-oriented optimization with multiple cues enables a highly accurate object pose estimation that is robust to local observations. Experimental results show that the proposed system is more robust to observation noise and significantly outperforms current state-of-the-art methods in outdoor environments. In addition, the proposed system demonstrates real-time performance.

Rui Tian, Yunzhou Zhang, Delong Zhu et al.

Scale ambiguity is a fundamental problem in monocular visual odometry. Typical solutions include loop closure detection and environment information mining. For applications like self-driving cars, loop closure is not always available, hence mining prior knowledge from the environment becomes a more promising approach. In this paper, with the assumption of a constant height of the camera above the ground, we develop a light-weight scale recovery framework leveraging an accurate and robust estimation of the ground plane. The framework includes a ground point extraction algorithm for selecting high-quality points on the ground plane, and a ground point aggregation algorithm for joining the extracted ground points in a local sliding window. Based on the aggregated data, the scale is finally recovered by solving a least-squares problem using a RANSAC-based optimizer. Sufficient data and robust optimizer enable a highly accurate scale recovery. Experiments on the KITTI dataset show that the proposed framework can achieve state-of-the-art accuracy in terms of translation errors, while maintaining competitive performance on the rotation error. Due to the light-weight design, our framework also demonstrates a high frequency of 20Hz on the dataset.

Yanmin Wu, Yunzhou Zhang, Delong Zhu et al.

This paper presents the first active object mapping framework for complex robotic manipulation and autonomous perception tasks. The framework is built on an object SLAM system integrated with a simultaneous multi-object pose estimation process that is optimized for robotic grasping. Aiming to reduce the observation uncertainty on target objects and increase their pose estimation accuracy, we also design an object-driven exploration strategy to guide the object mapping process, enabling autonomous mapping and high-level perception. Combining the mapping module and the exploration strategy, an accurate object map that is compatible with robotic grasping can be generated. Additionally, quantitative evaluations also indicate that the proposed framework has a very high mapping accuracy. Experiments with manipulation (including object grasping and placement) and augmented reality significantly demonstrate the effectiveness and advantages of our proposed framework.