Shuzhou Dong

Xudong Zhang, Shuang Gao, Xiaohu Nan et al.

Camera localization is a classical computer vision task that serves various Artificial Intelligence and Robotics applications. With the rapid developments of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), end-to-end visual localization methods are prosperous in recent years. In this work, we focus on the scene coordinate prediction ones and propose a network architecture named as Structure Guidance Learning (SGL) which utilizes the receptive branch and the structure branch to extract both high-level and low-level features to estimate the 3D coordinates. We design a confidence strategy to refine and filter the predicted 3D observations, which enables us to estimate the camera poses by employing the Perspective-n-Point (PnP) with RANSAC. In the training part, we design the Bundle Adjustment trainer to help the network fit the scenes better. Comparisons with some state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods and sufficient ablation experiments confirm the validity of our proposed architecture.

Jixiang Wan, Xudong Zhang, Shuzhou Dong et al.

Accurate and robust localization remains a significant challenge for autonomous vehicles. The cost of sensors and limitations in local computational efficiency make it difficult to scale to large commercial applications. Traditional vision-based approaches focus on texture features that are susceptible to changes in lighting, season, perspective, and appearance. Additionally, the large storage size of maps with descriptors and complex optimization processes hinder system performance. To balance efficiency and accuracy, we propose a novel lightweight visual semantic localization algorithm that employs stable semantic features instead of low-level texture features. First, semantic maps are constructed offline by detecting semantic objects, such as ground markers, lane lines, and poles, using cameras or LiDAR sensors. Then, online visual localization is performed through data association of semantic features and map objects. We evaluated our proposed localization framework in the publicly available KAIST Urban dataset and in scenarios recorded by ourselves. The experimental results demonstrate that our method is a reliable and practical localization solution in various autonomous driving localization tasks.

Shuang Gao, Jixiang Wan, Yishan Ping et al.

High-precision camera re-localization technology in a pre-established 3D environment map is the basis for many tasks, such as Augmented Reality, Robotics and Autonomous Driving. The point-based visual re-localization approaches are well-developed in recent decades, but are insufficient in some feature-less cases. In this paper, we design a complete pipeline for camera pose refinement with points and lines, which contains the innovatively designed line extracting CNN named VLSE, the line matching and the pose optimization approaches. We adopt a novel line representation and customize a hybrid convolution block based on the Stacked Hourglass network, to detect accurate and stable line features on images. Then we apply a geometric-based strategy to obtain precise 2D-3D line correspondences using epipolar constraint and reprojection filtering. A following point-line joint cost function is constructed to optimize the camera pose with the initial coarse pose from the pure point-based localization. Sufficient experiments are conducted on open datasets, i.e, line extractor on Wireframe and YorkUrban, localization performance on InLoc duc1 and duc2, to confirm the effectiveness of our point-line joint pose optimization method.