Lambert E. Wixson

John Lambert, Yuguang Li, Ivaylo Boyadzhiev et al.

We propose a new system for automatic 2D floorplan reconstruction that is enabled by SALVe, our novel pairwise learned alignment verifier. The inputs to our system are sparsely located 360$^\circ$ panoramas, whose semantic features (windows, doors, and openings) are inferred and used to hypothesize pairwise room adjacency or overlap. SALVe initializes a pose graph, which is subsequently optimized using GTSAM. Once the room poses are computed, room layouts are inferred using HorizonNet, and the floorplan is constructed by stitching the most confident layout boundaries. We validate our system qualitatively and quantitatively as well as through ablation studies, showing that it outperforms state-of-the-art SfM systems in completeness by over 200%, without sacrificing accuracy. Our results point to the significance of our work: poses of 81% of panoramas are localized in the first 2 connected components (CCs), and 89% in the first 3 CCs. Code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/zillow/salve.

Michael J. Swain, Lambert E. Wixson, Paul B. Chou

We present a new, deterministic, distributed MAP estimation algorithm for Markov Random Fields called Local Highest Confidence First (Local HCF). The algorithm has been applied to segmentation problems in computer vision and its performance compared with stochastic algorithms. The experiments show that Local HCF finds better estimates than stochastic algorithms with much less computation.

Lambert E. Wixson

Objects in the world usually appear in context, participating in spatial relationships and interactions that are predictable and expected. Knowledge of these contexts can be used in the task of using a mobile camera to search for a specified object in a room. We call this the object search task. This paper is concerned with representing this knowledge in a manner facilitating its application to object search while at the same time lending itself to autonomous learning by a robot. The ability for the robot to learn such knowledge without supervision is crucial due to the vast number of possible relationships that can exist for any given set of objects. Moreover, since a robot will not have an infinite amount of time to learn, it must be able to determine an order in which to look for possible relationships so as to maximize the rate at which new knowledge is gained. In effect, there must be a "focus of interest" operator that allows the robot to choose which examples are likely to convey the most new information and should be examined first. This paper demonstrates how a representation based on statistical confidence intervals allows the construction of a system that achieves the above goals. An algorithm, based on the Highest Impact First heuristic, is presented as a means for providing a "focus of interest" with which to control the learning process, and examples are given.