Publications
157 results found
Zhi S, Sucar E, Mouton A, et al., 2023, iLabel: revealing objects in neural fields, IEEE ROBOTICS AND AUTOMATION LETTERS, Vol: 8, Pages: 832-839, ISSN: 2377-3766
A neural field trained with self-supervision to efficiently represent the geometry and colour of a 3D scene tends to automatically decompose it into coherent and accurate object-like regions, which can be revealed with sparse labelling interactions to produce a 3D semantic scene segmentation. Our real-time iLabel system takes input from a hand-held RGB-D camera, requires zero prior training data, and works in an ‘open set’ manner, with semantic classes defined on the fly by the user. iLabel's underlying model is a simple multilayer perceptron (MLP), trained from scratch to learn a neural representation of a single 3D scene. The model is updated continually and visualised in real-time, allowing the user to focus interactions to achieve extremely efficient semantic segmentation. A room-scale scene can be accurately labelled into 10+ semantic categories with around 100 clicks, taking less than 5 minutes. Quantitative labelling accuracy scales powerfully with the number of clicks, and rapidly surpasses standard pre-trained semantic segmentation methods. We also demonstrate a hierarchical labelling variant of iLabel and a ‘hands-free’ mode where the user only needs to supply label names for automatically-generated locations.
Patwardhan A, Murai R, Davison AJ, 2023, Distributing collaborative multi-robot planning with Gaussian belief propagation, IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, Vol: 8, Pages: 552-559, ISSN: 2377-3766
Precise coordinated planning over a forward time window enables safe and highly efficient motion when many robots must work together in tight spaces, but this would normally require centralised control of all devices which is difficult to scale. We demonstrate GBP Planning, a new purely distributed technique based on Gaussian Belief Propagation for multi-robot planning problems, formulated by a generic factor graph defining dynamics and collision constraints over a forward time window. In simulations, we show that our method allows high performance collaborative planning where robots are able to cross each other in busy, intricate scenarios. They maintain shorter, quicker and smoother trajectories than alternative distributed planning techniques even in cases of communication failure. We encourage the reader to view the accompanying video demonstration.
Xu B, Davison AJ, Leutenegger S, 2022, Learning to complete object shapes for object-level mapping in dynamic scenes, 2022 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), Publisher: IEEE, Pages: 2257-2264
In this paper, we propose a novel object-level mapping system that can simultaneously segment, track, and reconstruct objects in dynamic scenes. It can further predict and complete their full geometries by conditioning on reconstructions from depth inputs and a category-level shape prior with the aim that completed object geometry leads to better object reconstruction and tracking accuracy. For each incoming RGB-D frame, we perform instance segmentation to detect objects and build data associations between the detection and the existing object maps. A new object map will be created for each unmatched detection. For each matched object, we jointly optimise its pose and latent geometry representations using geometric residual and differential rendering residual towards its shape prior and completed geometry. Our approach shows better tracking and reconstruction performance compared to methods using traditional volumetric mapping or learned shape prior approaches. We evaluate its effectiveness by quantitatively and qualitatively testing it in both synthetic and real-world sequences.
James S, Wada K, Laidlow T, et al., 2022, Coarse-to-fine Q-attention: efficient learning for visual robotic manipulation via discretisation, IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), Publisher: IEEE COMPUTER SOC, Pages: 13729-13738, ISSN: 1063-6919
We present a coarse-to-fine discretisation method that enables the use of discrete reinforcement learning approaches in place of unstable and data-inefficient actorcritic methods in continuous robotics domains. This approach builds on the recently released ARM algorithm, which replaces the continuous next-best pose agent with a discrete one, with coarse-to-fine Q-attention. Given a voxelised scene, coarse-to-fine Q-attention learns what part of the scene to ‘zoom’ into. When this ‘zooming’ behaviour is applied iteratively, it results in a near-lossless discretisation of the translation space, and allows the use of a discrete action, deep Q-learning method. We show that our new coarse-to-fine algorithm achieves state-of-the-art performance on several difficult sparsely rewarded RLBench vision-based robotics tasks, and can train real-world policies, tabula rasa, in a matter of minutes, with as little as 3 demonstrations.
Wada K, James S, Davison AJ, 2022, SafePicking: learning safe object extraction via object-level mapping, 2022 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Publisher: IEEE
Robots need object-level scene understanding to manipulate objects while reasoning about contact, support, and occlusion among objects. Given a pile of objects, object recognition and reconstruction can identify the boundary of object instances, giving important cues as to how the objects form and support the pile. In this work, we present a system, SafePicking, that integrates object-level mapping and learning-based motion planning to generate a motion that safely extracts occluded target objects from a pile. Planning is done by learning a deep Q-network that receives observations of predicted poses and a depth-based heightmap to output a motion trajectory, trained to maximize a safety metric reward. Our results show that the observation fusion of poses and depth-sensing gives both better performance and robustness to the model. We evaluate our methods using the YCB objects in both simulation and the real world, achieving safe object extraction from piles.
Ortiz J, Evans T, Sucar E, et al., 2022, Incremental abstraction in distributed probabilistic SLAM graphs, 2022 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Publisher: IEEE
Scene graphs represent the key components of a scene in a compact and semantically rich way, but are difficult to build during incremental SLAM operation because of the challenges of robustly identifying abstract scene elements and optimising continually changing, complex graphs. We present a distributed, graph-based SLAM framework for incrementally building scene graphs based on two novel components. First, we propose an incremental abstraction framework in which a neural network proposes abstract scene elements that are incorporated into the factor graph of a feature-based monocular SLAM system. Scene elements are confirmed or rejected through optimisation and incrementally replace the points yielding a more dense, semantic and compact representation. Second, enabled by our novel routing procedure, we use Gaussian Belief Propagation (GBP) for distributed inference on a graph processor. The time per iteration of GBP is structure-agnostic and we demonstrate the speed advantages over direct methods for inference of heterogeneous factor graphs. We run our system on real indoor datasets using planar abstractions and recover the major planes with significant compression.
Wada K, James S, Davison AJ, 2022, ReorientBot: learning object reorientation for specific-posed placement, 2022 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Publisher: IEEE
Robots need the capability of placing objects in arbitrary, specific poses to rearrange the world and achieve various valuable tasks. Object reorientation plays a crucial role in this as objects may not initially be oriented such that the robot can grasp and then immediately place them in a specific goal pose. In this work, we present a vision-based manipulation system, ReorientBot, which consists of 1) visual scene understanding with pose estimation and volumetric reconstruction using an onboard RGB-D camera; 2) learned waypoint selection for successful and efficient motion generation for reorientation; 3) traditional motion planning to generate a collision-free trajectory from the selected waypoints. We evaluate our method using the YCB objects in both simulation and the real world, achieving 93% overall success, 81% improvement in success rate, and 22% improvement in execution time compared to a heuristic approach. We demonstrate extended multi-object rearrangement showing the general capability of the system.
James S, Davison AJ, 2022, Q-Attention: Enabling Efficient Learning for Vision-Based Robotic Manipulation, IEEE ROBOTICS AND AUTOMATION LETTERS, Vol: 7, Pages: 1612-1619, ISSN: 2377-3766
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- Citations: 2
Scona R, Matsuki H, Davison A, 2022, From scene flow to visual odometry through local and global regularisation in markov random fields, IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, Vol: 7, Pages: 4299-4306, ISSN: 2377-3766
We revisit pairwise Markov Random Field (MRF) formulations for RGB-D scene flow and leverage novel advances in processor design for real-time implementations. We consider scene flow approaches which consist of data terms enforcing intensity consistency between consecutive images, together with regularisation terms which impose smoothness over the flow field. To achieve real-time operation, previous systems leveraged GPUs and implemented regularisation only between variables corresponding to neighbouring pixels. Such systems could estimate continuously deforming flow fields but the lack of global regularisation over the whole field made them ineffective for visual odometry. We leverage the GraphCore Intelligence Processing Unit (IPU) graph processor chip, which consists of 1216 independent cores called tiles, each with 256 kB local memory. The tiles are connected to an ultrafast all-to-all communication fabric which enables efficient data transmission between the tiles in an arbitrary communication pattern. We propose a distributed formulation for dense RGB-D scene flow based on Gaussian Belief Propagation which leverages the architecture of this processor to implement both local and global regularisation. Local regularisation is enforced for pairs of flow estimates whose corresponding pixels are neighbours, while global regularisation is defined for flow estimate pairs whose corresponding pixels are far from each other on the image plane. Using both types of regularisation allows our algorithm to handle a variety of in-scene motion and makes it suitable for estimating deforming scene flow, piece-wise rigid scene flow and visual odometry within the same system.
Sucar E, Liu S, Ortiz J, et al., 2022, iMAP: implicit mapping and positioning in real-time, 2021 IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), Publisher: IEEE, Pages: 6209-6218
We show for the first time that a multilayer perceptron (MLP) can serve as the only scene representation in a real-time SLAM system for a handheld RGB-D camera. Our network is trained in live operation without prior data, building a dense, scene-specific implicit 3D model of occupancy and colour which is also immediately used for tracking.Achieving real-time SLAM via continual training of a neural network against a live image stream requires significant innovation. Our iMAP algorithm uses a keyframe structure and multi-processing computation flow, with dynamic information-guided pixel sampling for speed, with tracking at 10 Hz and global map updating at 2 Hz. The advantages of an implicit MLP over standard dense SLAM techniques include efficient geometry representation with automatic detail control and smooth, plausible filling-in of unobserved regions such as the back surfaces of objects.
Zhi S, Laidlow T, Leutenegger S, et al., 2022, In-place scene labelling and understanding with implicit scene representation, 2021 IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), Publisher: IEEE
Semantic labelling is highly correlated with geometry and radiance reconstruction, as scene entities with similar shape and appearance are more likely to come from similar classes. Recent implicit neural reconstruction techniques are appealing as they do not require prior training data, but the same fully self-supervised approach is not possible for semantics because labels are human-defined properties.We extend neural radiance fields (NeRF) to jointly encode semantics with appearance and geometry, so that complete and accurate 2D semantic labels can be achieved using a small amount of in-place annotations specific to the scene. The intrinsic multi-view consistency and smoothness of NeRF benefit semantics by enabling sparse labels to efficiently propagate. We show the benefit of this approach when labels are either sparse or very noisy in room-scale scenes. We demonstrate its advantageous properties in various interesting applications such as an efficient scene labelling tool, novel semantic view synthesis, label denoising, super-resolution, label interpolation and multi-view semantic label fusion in visual semantic mapping systems.
Landgraf Z, Scona R, Laidlow T, et al., 2022, SIMstack: a generative shape and instance model for unordered object stacks, 2021 IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), Publisher: IEEE
By estimating 3D shape and instances from a single view, we can capture information about an environment quickly, without the need for comprehensive scanning and multi-view fusion. Solving this task for composite scenes (such as object stacks) is challenging: occluded areas are not only ambiguous in shape but also in instance segmentation; multiple decompositions could be valid. We observe that physics constrains decomposition as well as shape in occluded regions and hypothesise that a latent space learned from scenes built under physics simulation can serve as a prior to better predict shape and instances in occluded regions. To this end we propose SIMstack, a depth-conditioned Variational Auto-Encoder (VAE), trained on a dataset of objects stacked under physics simulation. We formulate instance segmentation as a centre voting task which allows for class-agnostic detection and doesn’t require setting the maximum number of objects in the scene. At test time, our model can generate 3D shape and instance segmentation from a single depth view, probabilistically sampling proposals for the occluded region from the learned latent space. Our method has practical applications in providing robots some of the ability humans have to make rapid intuitive inferences of partially observed scenes. We demonstrate an application for precise (non-disruptive) object grasping of unknown objects from a single depth view.
Laidlow T, Davison AJ, 2022, Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping With Quadric Surfaces, Pages: 252-260
There are many possibilities for how to represent the map in simultaneous localisation and mapping (SLAM). While sparse, keypoint-based SLAM systems have achieved impressive levels of accuracy and robustness, their maps may not be suitable for many robotic tasks. Dense SLAM systems are capable of producing dense reconstructions, but can be computationally expensive and, like sparse systems, lack higher-level information about the structure of a scene. Human-made environments contain a lot of structure, and we seek to take advantage of this by enabling the use of quadric surfaces as features in SLAM systems. We introduce a minimal representation for quadric surfaces and show how this can be included in a least-squares formulation. We also show how our representation can be easily extended to include additional constraints on quadrics such as those found in quadrics of revolution. Finally, we introduce a proof-of-concept SLAM system using our representation, and provide some experimental results using an RGB-D dataset.
Gallego G, Delbruck T, Orchard GM, et al., 2022, Event-Based Vision: A Survey, Publisher: IEEE COMPUTER SOC
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- Citations: 371
Matsuki H, Scona R, Czarnowski J, et al., 2021, CodeMapping: real-time dense mapping for sparse SLAM using compact scene representations, IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, Vol: 6, Pages: 7105-7112, ISSN: 2377-3766
We propose a novel dense mapping framework for sparse visual SLAM systems which leverages a compact scene representation. State-of-the-art sparse visual SLAM systems provide accurate and reliable estimates of the camera trajectory and locations of landmarks. While these sparse maps are useful for localization, they cannot be used for other tasks such as obstacle avoidance or scene understanding. In this letter we propose a dense mapping framework to complement sparse visual SLAM systems which takes as input the camera poses, keyframes and sparse points produced by the SLAM system and predicts a dense depth image for every keyframe. We build on CodeSLAM [1] and use a variational autoencoder (VAE) which is conditioned on intensity, sparse depth and reprojection error images from sparse SLAM to predict an uncertainty-aware dense depth map. The use of a VAE then enables us to refine the dense depth images through multi-view optimization which improves the consistency of overlapping frames. Our mapper runs in a separate thread in parallel to the SLAM system in a loosely coupled manner. This flexible design allows for integration with arbitrary metric sparse SLAM systems without delaying the main SLAM process. Our dense mapper can be used not only for local mapping but also globally consistent dense 3D reconstruction through TSDF fusion. We demonstrate our system running with ORB-SLAM3 and show accurate dense depth estimation which could enable applications such as robotics and augmented reality.
Xu B, Davison AJ, Leutenegger S, 2020, Deep probabilistic feature-metric tracking, Publisher: arXiv
Dense image alignment from RGB-D images remains a critical issue forreal-world applications, especially under challenging lighting conditions andin a wide baseline setting. In this paper, we propose a new framework to learna pixel-wise deep feature map and a deep feature-metric uncertainty mappredicted by a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), which together formulate adeep probabilistic feature-metric residual of the two-view constraint that canbe minimised using Gauss-Newton in a coarse-to-fine optimisation framework.Furthermore, our network predicts a deep initial pose for faster and morereliable convergence. The optimisation steps are differentiable and unrolled totrain in an end-to-end fashion. Due to its probabilistic essence, our approachcan easily couple with other residuals, where we show a combination with ICP.Experimental results demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on the TUM RGB-Ddataset and 3D rigid object tracking dataset. We further demonstrate ourmethod's robustness and convergence qualitatively.
Wada K, Sucar E, James S, et al., 2020, MoreFusion: multi-object reasoning for 6D pose estimation from volumetric fusion, 2020 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), Publisher: IEEE
Robots and other smart devices need efficient object-based scene representations from their on-board vision systems to reason about contact, physics and occlusion. Recognized precise object models will play an important role alongside non-parametric reconstructions of unrecognized structures. We present a system which can estimate the accurate poses of multiple known objects in contact and occlusion from real-time, embodied multi-view vision. Our approach makes 3D object pose proposals from single RGB-D views, accumulates pose estimates and non-parametric occupancy information from multiple views as the camera moves, and performs joint optimization to estimate consistent, non-intersecting poses for multiple objects in contact. We verify the accuracy and robustness of our approach experimentally on 2 object datasets: YCB-Video, and our own challenging Cluttered YCB-Video. We demonstrate a real-time robotics application where a robot arm precisely and orderly disassembles complicated piles of objects, using only on-board RGB-D vision.
Bonardi A, James S, Davison AJ, 2020, Learning one-shot imitation from humans without humans, IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, Vol: 5, Pages: 3533-3539, ISSN: 2377-3766
Humans can naturally learn to execute a new task by seeing it performed by other individuals once, and then reproduce it in a variety of configurations. Endowing robots with this ability of imitating humans from third person is a very immediate and natural way of teaching new tasks. Only recently, through meta-learning, there have been successful attempts to one-shot imitation learning from humans; however, these approaches require a lot of human resources to collect the data in the real world to train the robot. But is there a way to remove the need for real world human demonstrations during training? We show that with Task-Embedded Control Networks, we can infer control polices by embedding human demonstrations that can condition a control policy and achieve one-shot imitation learning. Importantly, we do not use a real human arm to supply demonstrations during training, but instead leverage domain randomisation in an application that has not been seen before: sim-to-real transfer on humans. Upon evaluating our approach on pushing and placing tasks in both simulation and in the real world, we show that in comparison to a system that was trained on real-world data we are able to achieve similar results by utilising only simulation data. Videos can be found here: https://sites.google.com/view/tecnets-humans .
James S, Ma Z, Arrojo DR, et al., 2020, RLBench: The robot learning benchmark & learning environment, IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, Vol: 5, Pages: 3019-3026, ISSN: 2377-3766
We present a challenging new benchmark and learning-environment for robot learning: RLBench. The benchmark features 100 completely unique, hand-designed tasks, ranging in difficulty from simple target reaching and door opening to longer multi-stage tasks, such as opening an oven and placing a tray in it. We provide an array of both proprioceptive observations and visual observations, which include rgb, depth, and segmentation masks from an over-the-shoulder stereo camera and an eye-in-hand monocular camera. Uniquely, each task comes with an infinite supply of demos through the use of motion planners operating on a series of waypoints given during task creation time; enabling an exciting flurry of demonstration-based learning possibilities. RLBench has been designed with scalability in mind; new tasks, along with their motion-planned demos, can be easily created and then verified by a series of tools, allowing users to submit their own tasks to the RLBench task repository. This large-scale benchmark aims to accelerate progress in a number of vision-guided manipulation research areas, including: reinforcement learning, imitation learning, multi-task learning, geometric computer vision, and in particular, few-shot learning. With the benchmark's breadth of tasks and demonstrations, we propose the first large-scale few-shot challenge in robotics. We hope that the scale and diversity of RLBench offers unparalleled research opportunities in the robot learning community and beyond. Benchmarking code and videos can be found at https://sites.google.com/view/rlbench .
Ortiz J, Pupilli M, Leutenegger S, et al., 2020, Bundle adjustment on a graph processor, Publisher: arXiv
Graph processors such as Graphcore's Intelligence Processing Unit (IPU) arepart of the major new wave of novel computer architecture for AI, and have ageneral design with massively parallel computation, distributed on-chip memoryand very high inter-core communication bandwidth which allows breakthroughperformance for message passing algorithms on arbitrary graphs. We show for thefirst time that the classical computer vision problem of bundle adjustment (BA)can be solved extremely fast on a graph processor using Gaussian BeliefPropagation. Our simple but fully parallel implementation uses the 1216 coreson a single IPU chip to, for instance, solve a real BA problem with 125keyframes and 1919 points in under 40ms, compared to 1450ms for the Ceres CPUlibrary. Further code optimisation will surely increase this difference onstatic problems, but we argue that the real promise of graph processing is forflexible in-place optimisation of general, dynamically changing factor graphsrepresenting Spatial AI problems. We give indications of this with experimentsshowing the ability of GBP to efficiently solve incremental SLAM problems, anddeal with robust cost functions and different types of factors.
Bloesch M, Laidlow T, Clark R, et al., 2020, Learning meshes for dense visual SLAM, 2019 IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), Publisher: IEEE
Estimating motion and surrounding geometry of a moving camera remains a challenging inference problem. From an information theoretic point of view, estimates should get better as more information is included, such as is done in dense SLAM, but this is strongly dependent on the validity of the underlying models. In the present paper, we use triangular meshes as both compact and dense geometry representation. To allow for simple and fast usage, we propose a view-based formulation for which we predict the in-plane vertex coordinates directly from images and then employ the remaining vertex depth components as free variables. Flexible and continuous integration of information is achieved through the use of a residual based inference technique. This so-called factor graph encodes all information as mapping from free variables to residuals, the squared sum of which is minimised during inference. We propose the use of different types of learnable residuals, which are trained end-to-end to increase their suitability as information bearing models and to enable accurate and reliable estimation. Detailed evaluation of all components is provided on both synthetic and real data which confirms the practicability of the presented approach.
Landgraf Z, Falck F, Bloesch M, et al., 2020, Comparing view-based and map-based semantic labelling in real-time SLAM, Publisher: arXiv
Generally capable Spatial AI systems must build persistent scenerepresentations where geometric models are combined with meaningful semanticlabels. The many approaches to labelling scenes can be divided into two cleargroups: view-based which estimate labels from the input view-wise data and thenincrementally fuse them into the scene model as it is built; and map-basedwhich label the generated scene model. However, there has so far been noattempt to quantitatively compare view-based and map-based labelling. Here, wepresent an experimental framework and comparison which uses real-time heightmap fusion as an accessible platform for a fair comparison, opening up theroute to further systematic research in this area.
Czarnowski J, Laidlow T, Clark R, et al., 2020, DeepFactors: Real-time probabilistic dense monocular SLAM, IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, Vol: 5, Pages: 721-728, ISSN: 2377-3766
The ability to estimate rich geometry and camera motion from monocular imagery is fundamental to future interactive robotics and augmented reality applications. Different approaches have been proposed that vary in scene geometry representation (sparse landmarks, dense maps), the consistency metric used for optimising the multi-view problem, and the use of learned priors. We present a SLAM system that unifies these methods in a probabilistic framework while still maintaining real-time performance. This is achieved through the use of a learned compact depth map representation and reformulating three different types of errors: photometric, reprojection and geometric, which we make use of within standard factor graph software. We evaluate our system on trajectory estimation and depth reconstruction on real-world sequences and present various examples of estimated dense geometry.
Johns E, Liu S, Davison A, 2020, End-to-end multi-task learning with attention, The IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019, Publisher: IEEE
We propose a novel multi-task learning architecture, which allows learning of task-specific feature-level attention. Our design, the Multi-Task Attention Network (MTAN), consists of a single shared network containing a global feature pool, together with a soft-attention module for each task. These modules allow for learning of task-specific features from the global features, whilst simultaneously allowing for features to be shared across different tasks. The architecture can be trained end-to-end and can be built upon any feed-forward neural network, is simple to implement, and is parameter efficient. We evaluate our approach on a variety of datasets, across both image-to-image predictions and image classification tasks. We show that our architecture is state-of-the-art in multi-task learning compared to existing methods, and is also less sensitive to various weighting schemes in the multi-task loss function. Code is available at https://github.com/lorenmt/mtan.
Sucar E, Wada K, Davison A, 2020, NodeSLAM: Neural Object Descriptors for Multi-View Shape Reconstruction, 8th International Conference on 3D Vision (3DV), Publisher: IEEE, Pages: 949-958, ISSN: 2378-3826
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- Citations: 13
Liu S, Davison A, Johns E, 2019, Self-supervised generalisation with meta auxiliary learning, 33rd Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2019), Publisher: Neural Information Processing Systems Foundation, Inc.
Learning with auxiliary tasks can improve the ability of a primary task to generalise.However, this comes at the cost of manually labelling auxiliary data. We propose anew method which automatically learns appropriate labels for an auxiliary task,such that any supervised learning task can be improved without requiring access toany further data. The approach is to train two neural networks: a label-generationnetwork to predict the auxiliary labels, and a multi-task network to train theprimary task alongside the auxiliary task. The loss for the label-generation networkincorporates the loss of the multi-task network, and so this interaction between thetwo networks can be seen as a form of meta learning with a double gradient. Weshow that our proposed method, Meta AuXiliary Learning (MAXL), outperformssingle-task learning on 7 image datasets, without requiring any additional data.We also show that MAXL outperforms several other baselines for generatingauxiliary labels, and is even competitive when compared with human-definedauxiliary labels. The self-supervised nature of our method leads to a promisingnew direction towards automated generalisation. Source code can be found athttps://github.com/lorenmt/maxl.
Saeedi S, Carvalho EDC, Li W, et al., 2019, Characterizing visual localization and mapping datasets, 2019 International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Publisher: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, ISSN: 1050-4729
Benchmarking mapping and motion estimation algorithms is established practice in robotics and computer vision. As the diversity of datasets increases, in terms of the trajectories, models, and scenes, it becomes a challenge to select datasets for a given benchmarking purpose. Inspired by the Wasserstein distance, this paper addresses this concern by developing novel metrics to evaluate trajectories and the environments without relying on any SLAM or motion estimation algorithm. The metrics, which so far have been missing in the research community, can be applied to the plethora of datasets that exist. Additionally, to improve the robotics SLAM benchmarking, the paper presents a new dataset for visual localization and mapping algorithms. A broad range of real-world trajectories is used in very high-quality scenes and a rendering framework to create a set of synthetic datasets with ground-truth trajectory and dense map which are representative of key SLAM applications such as virtual reality (VR), micro aerial vehicle (MAV) flight, and ground robotics.
Xu B, Li W, Tzoumanikas D, et al., 2019, MID-fusion: octree-based object-level multi-instance dynamic SLAM, ICRA 2019- IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, Publisher: IEEE
We propose a new multi-instance dynamic RGB-D SLAM system using anobject-level octree-based volumetric representation. It can provide robustcamera tracking in dynamic environments and at the same time, continuouslyestimate geometric, semantic, and motion properties for arbitrary objects inthe scene. For each incoming frame, we perform instance segmentation to detectobjects and refine mask boundaries using geometric and motion information.Meanwhile, we estimate the pose of each existing moving object using anobject-oriented tracking method and robustly track the camera pose against thestatic scene. Based on the estimated camera pose and object poses, we associatesegmented masks with existing models and incrementally fuse correspondingcolour, depth, semantic, and foreground object probabilities into each objectmodel. In contrast to existing approaches, our system is the first system togenerate an object-level dynamic volumetric map from a single RGB-D camera,which can be used directly for robotic tasks. Our method can run at 2-3 Hz on aCPU, excluding the instance segmentation part. We demonstrate its effectivenessby quantitatively and qualitatively testing it on both synthetic and real-worldsequences.
Bujanca M, Gafton P, Saeedi S, et al., 2019, SLAMBench 3.0: Systematic automated reproducible evaluation of SLAM systems for robot vision challenges and scene understanding, 2019 International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Publisher: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, ISSN: 1050-4729
As the SLAM research area matures and the number of SLAM systems available increases, the need for frameworks that can objectively evaluate them against prior work grows. This new version of SLAMBench moves beyond traditional visual SLAM, and provides new support for scene understanding and non-rigid environments (dynamic SLAM). More concretely for dynamic SLAM, SLAMBench 3.0 includes the first publicly available implementation of DynamicFusion, along with an evaluation infrastructure. In addition, we include two SLAM systems (one dense, one sparse) augmented with convolutional neural networks for scene understanding, together with datasets and appropriate metrics. Through a series of use-cases, we demonstrate the newly incorporated algorithms, visulation aids and metrics (6 new metrics, 4 new datasets and 5 new algorithms).
Zhi S, Bloesch M, Leutenegger S, et al., 2019, SceneCode: Monocular Dense Semantic Reconstruction using Learned Encoded Scene Representations, Publisher: IEEE
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- Citations: 15
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