Compared to regular cameras, Dynamic Vision Sensors or Event Cameras can output compact visual data based on a change in the intensity in each pixel location asynchronously. In this paper, we study the application of current image-based SLAM techniques to these novel sensors. To this end, the information in adaptively selected event windows is processed to form motion-compensated images. These images are then used to reconstruct the scene and estimate the 6-DOF pose of the camera. We also propose an inertial version of the event-only pipeline to assess its capabilities. We compare the results of different configurations of the proposed algorithm against the ground truth for sequences of two publicly available event datasets. We also compare the results of the proposed event-inertial pipeline with the state-of-the-art and show it can produce comparable or more accurate results provided the map estimate is reliable.
Computational Media Innovation Centre, Victoria University of Wellington（惠灵顿维多利亚大学计算媒体创新中心）；School of Engineering and Computer Science, Victoria University of Wellington（惠灵顿维多利亚大学工程与计算机科学学院）
Six degrees-of-freedom (6-DoF) video provides telepresence by enabling users to move around in the captured scene with a wide field of regard. Compared to methods requiring sophisticated camera setups, the image-based rendering method based on photogrammetry can work with images captured with any poses, which is more suitable for casual users. However, existing image-based rendering methods are based on perspective images. When used to reconstruct 6-DoF views, it often requires capturing hundreds of images, making data capture a tedious and time-consuming process. In contrast to traditional pe…
KU Leuven（鲁汶大学）；Ford（福特公司）；Ford Greenfield Labs（福特格林菲尔德实验室）
We describe a Deep-Geometric Localizer that is able to estimate the full 6 Degree of Freedom (DoF) global pose of the camera from a single image in a previously mapped environment. Our map is a topo-metric one, with discrete topological nodes whose 6 DoF poses are known. Each topo-node in our map also comprises of a set of points, whose 2D features and 3D locations are stored as part of the mapping process. For the mapping phase, we utilise a stereo camera and a regular stereo visual SLAM pipeline. During the localization phase, we take a single camera image, localize it to a topological node …
Camera pose estimation or camera relocalization is the centerpiece in numerous computer vision tasks such as visual odometry, structure from motion (SfM) and SLAM. In this paper we propose a neural network approach with a graph transformer backbone, namely TransCamP, to address the camera relocalization problem. In contrast with prior work where the pose regression is mainly guided by photometric consistency, TransCamP effectively fuses the image features, camera pose information and inter-frame relative camera motions into encoded graph attributes and is trained towards the graph consistency …
Novel view synthesis is a challenging problem in computer vision and robotics. Different from the existing works, which need the reference images or 3D models of the scene to generate images under novel views, we propose a novel paradigm to this problem. That is, we synthesize the novel view from only a 6-DoF camera pose directly. Although this setting is the most straightforward way, there are few works addressing it. While, our experiments demonstrate that, with a concise CNN, we could get a meaningful parametric model that could reconstruct the correct scenery images only from the 6-DoF pos…
Australian National University（澳大利亚国立大学）；Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学）；Australia Centre for Robotic Vision（澳大利亚机器人视觉中心）
Camera shake during exposure is a major problem in hand-held photography, as it causes image blur that destroys details in the captured images.~In the real world, such blur is mainly caused by both the camera motion and the complex scene structure.~While considerable existing approaches have been proposed based on various assumptions regarding the scene structure or the camera motion, few existing methods could handle the real 6 DoF camera motion.~In this paper, we propose to jointly estimate the 6 DoF camera motion and remove the non-uniform blur caused by camera motion by exploiting their un…
Tampere University of Technology（坦佩雷理工大学）；Universidad Industrial de Santander（桑坦德工业大学）；Czech Technical University in Prague（布拉格捷克理工大学）
We consider a single-query 6-DoF camera pose estimation with reference images and a point cloud, i.e. the problem of estimating the position and orientation of a camera by using reference images and a point cloud. In this work, we perform a systematic comparison of three state-of-the-art strategies for 6-DoF camera pose estimation, i.e. feature-based, photometric-based and mutual-information-based approaches. The performance of the studied methods is evaluated on two standard datasets in terms of success rate, translation error and max orientation error. Building on the results analysis, we pr…
Université Laval（拉瓦尔大学）；Thales Digital Solutions（泰雷兹数字解决方案）；Inria（法国国家信息与自动化研究所）
Augmented reality devices require multiple sensors to perform various tasks such as localization and tracking. Currently, popular cameras are mostly frame-based (e.g. RGB and Depth) which impose a high data bandwidth and power usage. With the necessity for low power and more responsive augmented reality systems, using solely frame-based sensors imposes limits to the various algorithms that needs high frequency data from the environement. As such, event-based sensors have become increasingly popular due to their low power, bandwidth and latency, as well as their very high frequency data acquisi…
As neuromorphic technology is maturing, its application to robotics and autonomous vehicle systems has become an area of active research. In particular, event cameras have emerged as a compelling alternative to frame-based cameras in low-power and latency-demanding applications. To enable event cameras to operate alongside staple sensors like lidar in perception tasks, we propose a direct, temporally-decoupled extrinsic calibration method between event cameras and lidars. The high dynamic range, high temporal resolution, and low-latency operation of event cameras are exploited to directly regi…
Full-DoF Egomotion Estimation for Event Cameras Using Geometric Solvers
Independent Researcher（独立研究者）；College of Aerospace Science and Engineering, National University of Defense Technology（国防科技大学航空航天学院）；Mobile Perception Lab, ShanghaiTech University（上海科技大学移动感知实验室）
The University of Western Australia（西澳大学）；Murdoch University（默多克大学）
We propose a novel concept to directly match feature descriptors extracted from RGB images, with feature descriptors extracted from 3D point clouds. We use this concept to localize the position and orientation (pose) of the camera of a query image in dense point clouds. We generate a dataset of matching 2D and 3D descriptors, and use it to train a proposed Descriptor-Matcher algorithm. To localize a query image in a point cloud, we extract 2D keypoints and descriptors from the query image. Then the Descriptor-Matcher is used to find the corresponding pairs 2D and 3D keypoints by matching the 2…
Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems（马克斯·普朗克智能系统研究所）
Event cameras are promising devices for lowlatency tracking and high-dynamic range imaging. In this paper,we propose a novel approach for 6 degree-of-freedom (6-DoF)object motion tracking that combines measurements of eventand frame-based cameras. We formulate tracking from highrate events with a probabilistic generative model of the eventmeasurement process of the object. On a second layer, we refinethe object trajectory in slower rate image frames through directimage alignment. We evaluate the accuracy of our approach inseveral object tracking scenarios with synthetic data, and alsoperform e…
School of Computer Science, University of Adelaide（阿德莱德大学计算机科学学院）
Estimating absolute camera orientations is essential for attitude estimation tasks. An established approach is to first carry out visual odometry (VO) or visual SLAM (V-SLAM), and retrieve the camera orientations (3 DOF) from the camera poses (6 DOF) estimated by VO or V-SLAM. One drawback of this approach, besides the redundancy in estimating full 6 DOF camera poses, is the dependency on estimating a map (3D scene points) jointly with the 6 DOF poses due to the basic constraint on structure-and-motion. To simplify the task of absolute orientation estimation, we formulate the monocular rotatio…
This technical report introduces CyberLoc, an image-based visual localization pipeline for robust and accurate long-term pose estimation under challenging conditions. The proposed method comprises four modules connected in a sequence. First, a mapping module is applied to build accurate 3D maps of the scene, one map for each reference sequence if there exist multiple reference sequences under different conditions. Second, a single-image-based localization pipeline (retrieval--matching--PnP) is performed to estimate 6-DoF camera poses for each query image, one for each 3D map. Third, a consensu…
Event cameras are bio-inspired vision sensors that output pixel-level brightness changes instead of standard intensity frames. These cameras do not suffer from motion blur and have a very high dynamic range, which enables them to provide reliable visual information during high-speed motions or in scenes characterized by high dynamic range. These features, along with a very low power consumption, make event cameras an ideal complement to standard cameras for VR/AR and video game applications. With these applications in mind, this paper tackles the problem of accurate, low-latency tracking of an…
DOF-GS:Adjustable Depth-of-Field 3D Gaussian Splatting for Post-Capture Refocusing, Defocus Rendering and Blur Removal
State Key Laboratory of General Artificial Intelligence, Peking University（通用人工智能国家重点实验室，北京大学）；School of Intelligence Science and Technology, Peking University（智能科学与技术学院，北京大学）；University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill（北卡罗来纳大学教堂山分校）
6-DoF Object Tracking with Event-based Optical Flow and Frames
Humanoid Sensing and Perception, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia（人形感知与感知，意大利技术研究所）；Event-driven Perception for Robotics, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia（机器人驱动感知，意大利技术研究所）；University of Genoa（热那亚大学）
Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and transfer learning have recently been used for 6 degrees of freedom (6-DoF) camera pose estimation. While they do not reach the same accuracy as visual SLAM-based approaches and are restricted to a specific environment, they excel in robustness and can be applied even to a single image. In this paper, we study PoseNet [1] and investigate modifications based on datasets' characteristics to improve the accuracy of the pose estimates. In particular, we emphasize the importance of field-of-view over image resolution; we present a data augmentation scheme to …
This paper presents two visual trackers from the different paradigms of learning and registration based tracking and evaluates their application in image based visual servoing. They can track object motion with four degrees of freedom (DoF) which, as we will show here, is sufficient for many fine manipulation tasks. One of these trackers is a newly developed learning based tracker that relies on learning discriminative correlation filters while the other is a refinement of a recent 8 DoF RANSAC based tracker adapted with a new appearance model for tracking 4 DoF motion. Both trackers are shown…
Australian National University（澳大利亚国立大学）；Huawei（华为）；University of Oxford（牛津大学）；Data61/CSIRO（澳大利亚联邦科学与工业研究组织数据61所）
We address the problem of ground-to-satellite image geo-localization, that is, estimating the camera latitude, longitude and orientation (azimuth angle) by matching a query image captured at the ground level against a large-scale database with geotagged satellite images. Our prior arts treat the above task as pure image retrieval by selecting the most similar satellite reference image matching the ground-level query image. However, such an approach often produces coarse location estimates because the geotag of the retrieved satellite image only corresponds to the image center while the ground …
We present an accurate and robust method for six degree of freedom image localization. There are two key-points of our method, 1. automatic immense photo synthesis and labeling from point cloud model and, 2. pose estimation with deep convolutional neural networks regression. Our model can directly regresses 6-DOF camera poses from images, accurately describing where and how it was captured. We achieved an accuracy within 1 meters and 1 degree on our out-door dataset, which covers about 2 acres on our school campus.
Keypoint-based Dynamic Object 6-DoF Pose Tracking via Event Camera
ShanghaiTech University（上海科技大学）；ShanghaiTech Automation and Robotics (STAR) Center（上海科技大学自动化与机器人中心）；School of Information Science and Technology（信息科学与技术学院）；WLSA Shanghai Academy（WLSA上海研究院）
Estimating the 3D pose of an object is a challenging task that can be considered within augmented reality or robotic applications. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to perform 6 DoF object pose estimation from a single RGB-D image. We adopt a hybrid pipeline in two stages: data-driven and geometric respectively. The data-driven step consists of a classification CNN to estimate the object 2D location in the image from local patches, followed by a regression CNN trained to predict the 3D location of a set of keypoints in the camera coordinate system. To extract the pose information, the…
Hamilton Institute（汉密尔顿研究所）；Maynooth University（梅努斯大学）
We present the Versatile Grasp Quality Convolutional Neural Network (VGQ-CNN), a grasp quality prediction network for 6-DOF grasps. VGQ-CNN can be used when evaluating grasps for objects seen from a wide range of camera poses or mobile robots without the need to retrain the network. By defining the grasp orientation explicitly as an input to the network, VGQ-CNN can evaluate 6-DOF grasp poses, moving beyond the 4-DOF grasps used in most image-based grasp evaluation methods like GQ-CNN. To train VGQ-CNN, we generate the new Versatile Grasp dataset (VG-dset) containing 6-DOF grasps observed from…
EDoF-NeRF: extended depth-of-field neural radiance fields using a coded aperture camera
Department of Information Physics and Computing, Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, The University of Tokyo（信息物理与计算系，信息科学与技术研究生学校，东京大学）
Virtual and augmented reality technologies have seen significant growth in the past few years. A key component of such systems is the ability to track the pose of head mounted displays and controllers in 3D space. We tackle the problem of efficient 6-DoF tracking of a handheld controller from egocentric camera perspectives. We collected the HMD Controller dataset which consist of over 540,000 stereo image pairs labelled with the full 6-DoF pose of the handheld controller. Our proposed SSD-AF-Stereo3D model achieves a mean average error of 33.5 millimeters in 3D keypoint prediction and is used …
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Research Institute of Tsinghua University in Shenzhen（清华大学深圳研究院）
Omnidirectional video is an essential component of Virtual Reality. Although various methods have been proposed to generate content that can be viewed with six degrees of freedom (6-DoF), existing systems usually involve complex depth estimation, image in-painting or stitching pre-processing. In this paper, we propose a system that uses a 3D ConvNet to generate a multi-sphere images (MSI) representation that can be experienced in 6-DoF VR. The system utilizes conventional omnidirectional VR camera footage directly without the need for a depth map or segmentation mask, thereby significantly sim…
We present a robust and real-time monocular six degree of freedom relocalization system. Our system trains a convolutional neural network to regress the 6-DOF camera pose from a single RGB image in an end-to-end manner with no need of additional engineering or graph optimisation. The algorithm can operate indoors and outdoors in real time, taking 5ms per frame to compute. It obtains approximately 2m and 6 degree accuracy for large scale outdoor scenes and 0.5m and 10 degree accuracy indoors. This is achieved using an efficient 23 layer deep convnet, demonstrating that convnets can be used to s…
ASGrasp: Generalizable Transparent Object Reconstruction and 6-DoF Grasp Detection from RGB-D Active Stereo Camera
Samsung R&D Institute China-Beijing（三星中国北京研发中心）；CFCS, School of Computer Science, Peking University（计算机科学系，北京大学）；Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (BAAI)（北京人工智能研究院）
University of Oxford（牛津大学）；University of Warwick（华威大学）
Machine learning techniques, namely convolutional neural networks (CNN) and regression forests, have recently shown great promise in performing 6-DoF localization of monocular images. However, in most cases image-sequences, rather only single images, are readily available. To this extent, none of the proposed learning-based approaches exploit the valuable constraint of temporal smoothness, often leading to situations where the per-frame error is larger than the camera motion. In this paper we propose a recurrent model for performing 6-DoF localization of video-clips. We find that, even by cons…
In this work we present a novel approach to joint semantic localisation and scene understanding. Our work is motivated by the need for localisation algorithms which not only predict 6-DoF camera pose but also simultaneously recognise surrounding objects and estimate 3D geometry. Such capabilities are crucial for computer vision guided systems which interact with the environment: autonomous driving, augmented reality and robotics. In particular, we propose a two step procedure. During the first step we train a convolutional neural network to jointly predict per-pixel globally unique instance la…
We present a challenging and realistic novel dataset for evaluating 6-DOF object tracking algorithms. Existing datasets show serious limitations---notably, unrealistic synthetic data, or real data with large fiducial markers---preventing the community from obtaining an accurate picture of the state-of-the-art. Using a data acquisition pipeline based on a commercial motion capture system for acquiring accurate ground truth poses of real objects with respect to a Kinect V2 camera, we build a dataset which contains a total of 297 calibrated sequences. They are acquired in three different scenario…
Real-time 6-DoF Pose Estimation by an Event-based Camera using Active LED Markers
Automation and Control Institute (ACIN), TU Wien（维也纳工业大学自动化与控制研究所（ACIN））；Austrian Institute of Technology (AIT)（奥地利技术研究院（AIT））；Prophesee GmbH（Prophesee有限公司）
Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学人工智能学院）；Bytedance AI Lab（字节跳动人工智能实验室）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）
Grasping in cluttered scenes has always been a great challenge for robots, due to the requirement of the ability to well understand the scene and object information. Previous works usually assume that the geometry information of the objects is available, or utilize a step-wise, multi-stage strategy to predict the feasible 6-DoF grasp poses. In this work, we propose to formalize the 6-DoF grasp pose estimation as a simultaneous multi-task learning problem. In a unified framework, we jointly predict the feasible 6-DoF grasp poses, instance semantic segmentation, and collision information. The wh…
NeuroLoc: Encoding Navigation Cells for 6-DOF Camera Localization
Software Engineering Institute, East China Normal University（华东师范大学软件工程学院）；School of Geospatial Information, Information Engineering University（信息工程大学地理信息学院）；University of Shanghai for Science and Technology（上海科技大学）；Fujian (Quanzhou) Institute of Advanced Manufacturing Technology, China（福建（泉州）先进制造技术研究院）
Dalian University of Technology（大连理工大学）；ByteDance AI Lab（字节跳动人工智能实验室）；Adobe Research（奥多比研究院）；Adobe Systems（奥多比系统公司）
We aim to generate high resolution shallow depth-of-field (DoF) images from a single all-in-focus image with controllable focal distance and aperture size. To achieve this, we propose a novel neural network model comprised of a depth prediction module, a lens blur module, and a guided upsampling module. All modules are differentiable and are learned from data. To train our depth prediction module, we collect a dataset of 2462 RGB-D images captured by mobile phones with a dual-lens camera, and use existing segmentation datasets to improve border prediction. We further leverage a synthetic datas…
In this paper, we present a novel linear algorithm to estimate the 6 DoF relative pose from consecutive frames of stereo rolling shutter (RS) cameras. Our method is derived based on the assumption that stereo cameras undergo motion with constant velocity around the center of the baseline, which needs 9 pairs of correspondences on both left and right consecutive frames. The stereo RS images enable the recovery of depth maps from the semi-global matching (SGM) algorithm. With the estimated camera motion and depth map, we can correct the RS images to get the undistorted images without any scene s…
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Karlsruhe Institute of Technology（卡尔斯鲁厄理工学院）
Semantic segmentation is a critical method in the field of autonomous driving. When performing semantic image segmentation, a wider field of view (FoV) helps to obtain more information about the surrounding environment, making automatic driving safer and more reliable, which could be offered by fisheye cameras. However, large public fisheye datasets are not available, and the fisheye images captured by the fisheye camera with large FoV comes with large distortion, so commonly-used semantic segmentation model cannot be directly utilized. In this paper, a seven degrees of freedom (DoF) augmentat…
This paper proposes a robust localization system that employs deep learning for better scene representation, and enhances the accuracy of 6-DOF camera pose estimation. Inspired by the fact that global scene structure can be revealed by wide field-of-view, we leverage the large overlap of a fisheye camera between adjacent frames, and the powerful high-level feature representations of deep learning. Our main contribution is the novel network architecture that extracts both temporal and spatial information using a Recurrent Neural Network. Specifically, we propose a novel pose regularization term…
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）
The monocular visual-inertial system (VINS), which consists one camera and one low-cost inertial measurement unit (IMU), is a popular approach to achieve accurate 6-DOF state estimation. However, such locally accurate visual-inertial odometry is prone to drift and cannot provide absolute pose estimation. Leveraging history information to relocalize and correct drift has become a hot topic. In this paper, we propose a monocular visual-inertial SLAM system, which can relocalize camera and get the absolute pose in a previous-built map. Then 4-DOF pose graph optimization is performed to correct dr…
Deep learning has shown to be effective for robust and real-time monocular image relocalisation. In particular, PoseNet is a deep convolutional neural network which learns to regress the 6-DOF camera pose from a single image. It learns to localize using high level features and is robust to difficult lighting, motion blur and unknown camera intrinsics, where point based SIFT registration fails. However, it was trained using a naive loss function, with hyper-parameters which require expensive tuning. In this paper, we give the problem a more fundamental theoretical treatment. We explore a number…
Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；East China Normal University（华东师范大学）
Most recent head pose estimation (HPE) methods are dominated by the Euler angle representation. To avoid its inherent ambiguity problem of rotation labels, alternative quaternion-based and vector-based representations are introduced. However, they both are not visually intuitive, and often derived from equivocal Euler angle labels. In this paper, we present a novel single-stage keypoint-based method via an {\it intuitive} and {\it unconstrained} 2D cube representation for joint head detection and pose estimation. The 2D cube is an orthogonal projection of the 3D regular hexahedron label roughl…
