Imad H. Elhajj

Yan Song Hu, Nicolas Abboud, Muhammad Qasim Ali et al.

Real-time SLAM with dense 3D mapping is computationally challenging, especially on resource-limited devices. The recent development of 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) offers a promising approach for real-time dense 3D reconstruction. However, existing 3DGS-based SLAM systems struggle to balance hardware simplicity, speed, and map quality. Most systems excel in one or two of the aforementioned aspects but rarely achieve all. A key issue is the difficulty of initializing 3D Gaussians while concurrently conducting SLAM. To address these challenges, we present Monocular GSO (MGSO), a novel real-time SLAM system that integrates photometric SLAM with 3DGS. Photometric SLAM provides dense structured point clouds for 3DGS initialization, accelerating optimization and producing more efficient maps with fewer Gaussians. As a result, experiments show that our system generates reconstructions with a balance of quality, memory efficiency, and speed that outperforms the state-of-the-art. Furthermore, our system achieves all results using RGB inputs. We evaluate the Replica, TUM-RGBD, and EuRoC datasets against current live dense reconstruction systems. Not only do we surpass contemporary systems, but experiments also show that we maintain our performance on laptop hardware, making it a practical solution for robotics, A/R, and other real-time applications.

Nicolas Abboud, Malak Sayour, Imad H. Elhajj et al.

This paper presents an integrated approach to Visual SLAM, merging online sequential photometric calibration within a Hybrid direct-indirect visual SLAM (H-SLAM). Photometric calibration helps normalize pixel intensity values under different lighting conditions, and thereby improves the direct component of our H-SLAM. A tangential benefit also results to the indirect component of H-SLAM given that the detected features are more stable across variable lighting conditions. Our proposed photometrically calibrated H-SLAM is tested on several datasets, including the TUM monoVO as well as on a dataset we created. Calibrated H-SLAM outperforms other state of the art direct, indirect, and hybrid Visual SLAM systems in all the experiments. Furthermore, in online SLAM tested at our site, it also significantly outperformed the other SLAM Systems.

Jawad Haidar, Marc Mouawad, Imad Elhajj et al.

Instance segmentation is an advanced form of image segmentation which, beyond traditional segmentation, requires identifying individual instances of repeating objects in a scene. Mask R-CNN is the most common architecture for instance segmentation, and improvements to this architecture include steps such as benefiting from bounding box refinements, adding semantics, or backbone enhancements. In all the proposed variations to date, the problem of competing kernels (each class aims to maximize its own accuracy) persists when models try to synchronously learn numerous classes. In this paper, we propose mitigating this problem by replacing mask prediction with a Switch-Split block that processes refined ROIs, classifies them, and assigns them to specialized mask predictors. We name the method MaskUno and test it on various models from the literature, which are then trained on multiple classes using the benchmark COCO dataset. An increase in the mean Average Precision (mAP) of 2.03% was observed for the high-performing DetectoRS when trained on 80 classes. MaskUno proved to enhance the mAP of instance segmentation models regardless of the number and typ

Hasan Moughnieh, Ibrahim Ghaddar, Hadi Elham et al.

Robust multi-sensor fusion is essential for reliable autonomy in diverse and degraded environments, where sensor reliability can fluctuate rapidly. Because different modalities fail in distinct ways, effective fusion should adaptively balance complementary cues rather than rely on fixed weighting. This adaptability is particularly important for ego-motion estimation, since accurate updates depend on the consistent integration of complementary sensor information. We propose ADM-Fusion, an end-to-end deep learning based multi-sensor fusion method designed to adapt to environmental changes and sensor degradation. ADM-Fusion employs an adaptive sensor mixture-of-experts framework with content-aware routing to dynamically assign weights to sensor inputs in real time. The system further incorporates separate translation and rotation branches, coupled through a cross-task attention mechanism to preserve task-specific specialization while enabling information sharing. ADM-Fusion is trained on the CARLA-LOC simulated dataset and subsequently fine-tuned on KITTI real-world data, demonstrating effective simulation-to-real transfer. Experiments show that ADM-Fusion remains robust under degraded conditions while maintaining competitive performance against existing methods.

Batool Ibrahim, Imad H. Elhajj, Daniel Asmar et al.

Recent advances in robotics have enabled robots to operate in shared human environments, emphasizing the importance of effective human robot interaction HRI. Prior studies indicate that anthropomorphism, defined as the incorporation of human like features into robotic systems, facilitates more natural interaction and enhances both task performance and user experience. In robotic arm teleoperation, however, user controlled motions often deviate from human like kinematic characteristics due to intrinsic limitations of teleoperation systems. In this work, we propose a real time framework that generates human like end effector trajectories based on the two thirds power law of voluntary human hand movements, while preserving the operators intended control inputs. The proposed approach is validated through real world experiments conducted on a 6 degree of freedom Dobot CR10 robotic arm. Quantitative analysis demonstrates that the generated trajectories exhibit significantly stronger adherence to human like kinematic profiles compared to conventional teleoperation, with the estimated beta coefficient moving 39.7% closer on average to the theoretical value of 1/3. Furthermore, the method achieves an approximate 34% improvement in motion smoothness, measured by RMS torque rate reduction, with 80% of evaluated motion patterns showing statistically significant improvements while maintaining comparable task completion times.