Monica Nicolescu

Shuvo Kumar Paul, Pourya Hoseini, Mircea Nicolescu et al.

Detecting image correspondences by feature matching forms the basis of numerous computer vision applications. Several detectors and descriptors have been presented in the past, addressing the efficient generation of features from interest points (keypoints) in an image. In this paper, we investigate eight binary descriptors (AKAZE, BoostDesc, BRIEF, BRISK, FREAK, LATCH, LUCID, and ORB) and eight interest point detector (AGAST, AKAZE, BRISK, FAST, HarrisLapalce, KAZE, ORB, and StarDetector). We have decoupled the detection and description phase to analyze the interest point detectors and then evaluate the performance of the pairwise combination of different detectors and descriptors. We conducted experiments on a standard dataset and analyzed the comparative performance of each method under different image transformations. We observed that: (1) the FAST, AGAST, ORB detectors were faster and detected more keypoints, (2) the AKAZE and KAZE detectors performed better under photometric changes while ORB was more robust against geometric changes, (3) in general, descriptors performed better when paired with the KAZE and AKAZE detectors, (4) the BRIEF, LUCID, ORB descriptors were relatively faster, and (5) none of the descriptors did particularly well under geometric transformations, only BRISK, FREAK, and AKAZE showed reasonable resiliency.

Santosh Balajee Banisetty, Scott Forer, Logan Yliniemi et al.

Mobile robots are increasingly populating homes, hospitals, shopping malls, factory floors, and other human environments. Human society has social norms that people mutually accept; obeying these norms is an essential signal that someone is participating socially with respect to the rest of the population. For robots to be socially compatible with humans, it is crucial for robots to obey these social norms. In prior work, we demonstrated a Socially-Aware Navigation (SAN) planner, based on Pareto Concavity Elimination Transformation (PaCcET), in a hallway scenario, optimizing two objectives so that the robot does not invade the personal space of people. This paper extends our PaCcET based SAN planner to multiple scenarios with more than two objectives. We modified the Robot Operating System's (ROS) navigation stack to include PaCcET in the local planning task. We show that our approach can accommodate multiple Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) scenarios. Using the proposed approach, we achieved successful HRI in multiple scenarios like hallway interactions, an art gallery, waiting in a queue, and interacting with a group. We implemented our method on a simulated PR2 robot in a 2D simulator (Stage) and a pioneer-3DX mobile robot in the real-world to validate all the scenarios. A comprehensive set of experiments shows that our approach can handle multiple interaction scenarios on both holonomic and non-holonomic robots; hence, it can be a viable option for a Unified Socially-Aware Navigation (USAN).