Jack Naylor

Ryan Griffiths, Jack Naylor, Donald G. Dansereau · cambridge

There are a multitude of emerging imaging technologies that could benefit robotics. However the need for bespoke models, calibration and low-level processing represents a key barrier to their adoption. In this work we present NOCaL, Neural odometry and Calibration using Light fields, a semi-supervised learning architecture capable of interpreting previously unseen cameras without calibration. NOCaL learns to estimate camera parameters, relative pose, and scene appearance. It employs a scene-rendering hypernetwork pretrained on a large number of existing cameras and scenes, and adapts to previously unseen cameras using a small supervised training set to enforce metric scale. We demonstrate NOCaL on rendered and captured imagery using conventional cameras, demonstrating calibration-free odometry and novel view synthesis. This work represents a key step toward automating the interpretation of general camera geometries and emerging imaging technologies.

Cedric Le Gentil, Jack Naylor, Nuwan Munasinghe et al.

In-orbit automated servicing is a promising path towards lowering the cost of satellite operations and reducing the amount of orbital debris. For this purpose, we present a pipeline for automated satellite docking port detection and state estimation using monocular vision data from standard RGB sensing or an event camera. Rather than taking snapshots of the environment, an event camera has independent pixels that asynchronously respond to light changes, offering advantages such as high dynamic range, low power consumption and latency, etc. This work focuses on satellite-agnostic operations (only a geometric knowledge of the actual port is required) using the recently released Lockheed Martin Mission Augmentation Port (LM-MAP) as the target. By leveraging shallow data-driven techniques to preprocess the incoming data to highlight the LM-MAP's reflective navigational aids and then using basic geometric models for state estimation, we present a lightweight and data-efficient pipeline that can be used independently with either RGB or event cameras. We demonstrate the soundness of the pipeline and perform a quantitative comparison of the two modalities based on data collected with a photometrically accurate test bench that includes a robotic arm to simulate the target satellite's uncontrolled motion.

James L. Gray, Nikolai Goncharov, Alexandre Cardaillac et al.

Asset management requires accurate 3D models to inform the maintenance, repair, and assessment of buildings, maritime vessels, and other key structures as they age. These downstream applications rely on high-fidelity models produced from aerial surveys in close proximity to the asset, enabling operators to locate and characterise deterioration or damage and plan repairs. Captured images typically have high overlap between adjacent camera poses, sufficient detail at millimetre scale, and challenging visual appearances such as reflections and transparency. However, existing 3D reconstruction datasets lack examples of these conditions, making it difficult to benchmark methods for this task. We present a new dataset with ground truth depth maps, camera poses, and mesh models of three synthetic scenes with simulated inspection trajectories and varying levels of surface condition on non-Lambertian scene content. We evaluate state-of-the-art reconstruction methods on this dataset. Our results demonstrate that current approaches struggle significantly with the dense capture trajectories and complex surface conditions inherent to this domain, exposing a critical scalability gap and pointing toward new research directions for deployable 3D reconstruction in asset inspection. Project page: https://roboticimaging.org/Projects/asset-inspection-dataset/

Jack Naylor, Viorela Ila, Donald G. Dansereau

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) provide a high fidelity, continuous scene representation that can realistically represent complex behaviour of light. Despite works like Ref-NeRF improving geometry through physics-inspired models, the ability for a NeRF to overcome shape-radiance ambiguity and converge to a representation consistent with real geometry remains limited. We demonstrate how both curriculum learning of a surface light field model and using a lattice-based hash encoding helps a NeRF converge towards a more geometrically accurate scene representation. We introduce four regularisation terms to impose geometric smoothness, consistency of normals, and a separation of Lambertian and specular appearance at geometry in the scene, conforming to physical models. Our approach yields 28% more accurate normals than traditional grid-based NeRF variants with reflection parameterisation. Our approach more accurately separates view-dependent appearance, conditioning a NeRF to have a geometric representation consistent with the captured scene. We demonstrate compatibility of our method with existing NeRF variants, as a key step in enabling radiance-based representations for geometry critical applications.