Object pose estimation underwater allows an autonomous system to perform tracking and intervention tasks. Nonetheless, underwater target pose estimation is remarkably challenging due to, among many factors, limited visibility, light scattering, cluttered environments, and constantly varying water conditions. An approach is to employ sonar or laser sensing to acquire 3D data, however, the data is not clear and the sensors expensive. For this reason, the community has focused on extracting pose estimates from RGB input. In this work, we propose an approach that leverages 2D object detection to reliably compute 6D pose estimates in different underwater scenarios. We test our proposal with 4 objects with symmetrical shapes and poor texture spanning across 33,920 synthetic and 10 real scenes. All objects and scenes are made available in an open-source dataset that includes annotations for object detection and pose estimation. When benchmarking against similar end-to-end methodologies for 6D object pose estimation, our pipeline provides estimates that are 8% more accurate. We also demonstrate the real world usability of our pose estimation pipeline on an underwater robotic manipulator in a reaching task.
In this paper, we present a fast monocular depth estimation method for enabling 3D perception capabilities of low-cost underwater robots. We formulate a novel end-to-end deep visual learning pipeline named UDepth, which incorporates domain knowledge of image formation characteristics of natural underwater scenes. First, we adapt a new input space from raw RGB image space by exploiting underwater light attenuation prior, and then devise a least-squared formulation for coarse pixel-wise depth prediction. Subsequently, we extend this into a domain projection loss that guides the end-to-end learni…
French Research Institute for Exploitation of the Sea (IFREMER)（法国海洋开发研究院）；Research Centre in Underwater Robotics (CIRS), University of Girona（赫罗纳大学水下机器人研究中心）
Hyperspectral imaging has been increasingly used for underwater survey applications over the past years. As many hyperspectral cameras work as push-broom scanners, their use is usually limited to the creation of photo-mosaics based on a flat surface approximation and by interpolating the camera pose from dead-reckoning navigation. Yet, because of drift in the navigation and the mostly wrong flat surface assumption, the quality of the obtained photo-mosaics is often too low to support adequate analysis.In this paper we present an initial method for creating hyperspectral 3D reconstructions of u…
Vision-based robotic assembly is a crucial yet challenging task as the interaction with multiple objects requires high levels of precision. In this paper, we propose an integrated 6D robotic system to perceive, grasp, manipulate and assemble blocks with tight tolerances. Aiming to provide an off-the-shelf RGB-only solution, our system is built upon a monocular 6D object pose estimation network trained solely with synthetic images leveraging physically-based rendering. Subsequently, pose-guided 6D transformation along with collision-free assembly is proposed to construct any designed structure …
Object pose estimation is a necessary prerequisite for autonomous robotic manipulation, but the presence of symmetry increases the complexity of the pose estimation task. Existing methods for object pose estimation output a single 6D pose. Thus, they lack the ability to reason about symmetries. Lately, modeling object orientation as a non-parametric probability distribution on the SO(3) manifold by neural networks has shown impressive results. However, acquiring large-scale datasets to train pose estimation models remains a bottleneck. To address this limitation, we introduce an automatic pose…
Autonomous robot manipulation involves estimating the translation and orientation of the object to be manipulated as a 6-degree-of-freedom (6D) pose. Methods using RGB-D data have shown great success in solving this problem. However, there are situations where cost constraints or the working environment may limit the use of RGB-D sensors. When limited to monocular camera data only, the problem of object pose estimation is very challenging. In this work, we introduce a novel method called SilhoNet that predicts 6D object pose from monocular images. We use a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) pi…
Indian Institute of Technology Madras（印度理工学院马德拉斯分校）
Depth estimation from a single underwater image is one of the most challenging problems and is highly ill-posed. Due to the absence of large generalized underwater depth datasets and the difficulty in obtaining ground truth depth-maps, supervised learning techniques such as direct depth regression cannot be used. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised method for depth estimation from a single underwater image taken `in the wild' by using haze as a cue for depth. Our approach is based on indirect depth-map estimation where we learn the mapping functions between unpaired RGB-D terrestrial ima…
Qing Yuan Research Institute（庆元研究院）；MoE Key Lab of Artificial Intelligence（教育部人工智能重点实验室）；AI Institute（人工智能研究院）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）
General object grasping is an important yet unsolved problem in the field of robotics. Most of the current methods either generate grasp poses with few DoF that fail to cover most of the success grasps, or only take the unstable depth image or point cloud as input which may lead to poor results in some cases. In this paper, we propose RGBD-Grasp, a pipeline that solves this problem by decoupling 7-DoF grasp detection into two sub-tasks where RGB and depth information are processed separately. In the first stage, an encoder-decoder like convolutional neural network Angle-View Net(AVN) is propos…
DKPMV: Dense Keypoints Fusion from Multi-View RGB Frames for 6D Pose Estimation of Textureless Objects
College of Aerospace Science and Engineering, National University of Defense Technology（航空航天科学与工程学院，国防科技大学）；Hunan Provincial Key Laboratory of Image Measurement and Vision Navigation（图像测量与视觉导航省级重点实验室）
SplatPose: Geometry-Aware 6-DoF Pose Estimation from Single RGB Image via 3D Gaussian Splatting
Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）；Zhengzhou Research Institute, Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学郑州研究院）；School of Information Science and Technology, Harbin Institute of Technology (Shen Zhen)（哈尔滨工业大学（深圳）信息科学与技术学院）；Jianghuai Advance Technology Center（江淮先进技术中心）
Toyota Research Institute（丰田研究院）；Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；Siemens R&D（西门子研发中心）
We present a novel method for detecting 3D model instances and estimating their 6D poses from RGB data in a single shot. To this end, we extend the popular SSD paradigm to cover the full 6D pose space and train on synthetic model data only. Our approach competes or surpasses current state-of-the-art methods that leverage RGB-D data on multiple challenging datasets. Furthermore, our method produces these results at around 10Hz, which is many times faster than the related methods. For the sake of reproducibility, we make our trained networks and detection code publicly available.
AquaFlow: A Monocular Gaussian Splatting SLAM for Underwater Streaming Reconstruction
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Shanghai AI Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）
A Multi-Mode Structured Light 3D Imaging System with Multi-Source Information Fusion for Underwater Pipeline Detection
College of Information Science and Technology, Beijing University of Chemical Technology, Beijing 100029, China（信息科学与技术学院，北京化工大学，中国北京100029）；Department of Mechanical Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China（机械工程系，清华大学，中国北京100084）；Guoneng Zhishen Control Technology Co., Ltd., Beijing 102211, China（国能智深控制技术有限公司，中国北京102211）；College of Intelligent Science and Engineering, Beijing University of Agriculture, Beijing 102206, China（智能科学与工程学院，北京农业大学，中国北京102206）
We address the task of 6D pose estimation of known rigid objects from single input images in scenarios where the objects are partly occluded. Recent RGB-D-based methods are robust to moderate degrees of occlusion. For RGB inputs, no previous method works well for partly occluded objects. Our main contribution is to present the first deep learning-based system that estimates accurate poses for partly occluded objects from RGB-D and RGB input. We achieve this with a new instance-aware pipeline that decomposes 6D object pose estimation into a sequence of simpler steps, where each step removes spe…
Underwater360: Reconstructing Underwater Scenes from Panoramic Images with Omnidirectional Gaussian Splatting
School of Software, Dalian University of Technology（大连理工大学软件学院）；College of Computing and Data Science, Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学计算与数据科学学院）
Visual enhancement and 3D representation for underwater scenes: a review
Visual Information Laboratory, University of Bristol（视觉信息实验室，布里斯托尔大学）；Submerged Resources Center, National Park Service（水下资源中心，国家公园服务）；Marine Imaging Technologies, LLC（海洋成像技术有限公司）；Gates Underwater Products, Inc（盖茨水下产品公司）；Esprit film and television Ltd（Esprit电影和电视有限公司）
Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics（南京航空航天大学）；The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）；Deakin University（迪肯大学）；Hong Kong Metropolitan University（香港都会大学）
6D pose estimation of rigid objects from RGB-D images is crucial for object grasping and manipulation in robotics. Although RGB channels and the depth (D) channel are often complementary, providing respectively the appearance and geometry information, it is still non-trivial how to fully benefit from the two cross-modal data. From the simple yet new observation, when an object rotates, its semantic label is invariant to the pose while its keypoint offset direction is variant to the pose. To this end, we present SO(3)-Pose, a new representation learning network to explore SO(3)-equivariant and …
Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；University of Bologna（博洛尼亚大学）；Siemens AG, Munich（西门子股份公司（慕尼黑））
We present a 3D object detection method that uses regressed descriptors of locally-sampled RGB-D patches for 6D vote casting. For regression, we employ a convolutional auto-encoder that has been trained on a large collection of random local patches. During testing, scene patch descriptors are matched against a database of synthetic model view patches and cast 6D object votes which are subsequently filtered to refined hypotheses. We evaluate on three datasets to show that our method generalizes well to previously unseen input data, delivers robust detection results that compete with and surpass…
Bosch Center for Artificial Intelligence（博世人工智能中心）；University of Tübingen（图宾根大学）；Robert Bosch GmbH（罗伯特·博世有限公司）；Karlsruhe Institute of Technology（卡尔斯鲁厄理工学院）
Estimating 6D poses of objects is an essential computer vision task. However, most conventional approaches rely on camera data from a single perspective and therefore suffer from occlusions. We overcome this issue with our novel multi-view 6D pose estimation method called MV6D which accurately predicts the 6D poses of all objects in a cluttered scene based on RGB-D images from multiple perspectives. We base our approach on the PVN3D network that uses a single RGB-D image to predict keypoints of the target objects. We extend this approach by using a combined point cloud from multiple views and …
University of South Carolina（南卡罗来纳大学）；McGill University（麦吉尔大学）；Dartmouth College（达特茅斯学院）
In this paper, we propose a real-time deep learning approach for determining the 6D relative pose of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUV) from a single image. A team of autonomous robots localizing themselves in a communication-constrained underwater environment is essential for many applications such as underwater exploration, mapping, multi-robot convoying, and other multi-robot tasks. Due to the profound difficulty of collecting ground truth images with accurate 6D poses underwater, this work utilizes rendered images from the Unreal Game Engine simulation for training. An image-to-image tra…
Design, Implementation and Evaluation of an External Pose-Tracking System for Underwater Cameras
GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel（基尔亥姆霍兹海洋研究中心）；Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel（基尔大学）；University of Applied Sciences Kiel（基尔应用科学大学）
Rutgers University（罗格斯大学）；Cleveland State University（克利夫兰州立大学）
New efficient source feature compression solutions are proposed based on a two-stage Walsh-Hadamard Transform (WHT) for Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)-based object classification in underwater robotics. The object images are firstly transformed by WHT following a two-stage process. The transform-domain tensors have large values concentrated in the upper left corner of the matrices in the RGB channels. By observing this property, the transform-domain matrix is partitioned into inner and outer regions. Consequently, two novel partitioning methods are proposed in this work: (i) fixing the siz…
Dehazing-aided Multi-Rate Multi-Modal Pose Estimation Framework for Mitigating Visual Disturbances in Extreme Underwater Domain
Center for Autonomous Robotic Systems, Khalifa University（哈利法大学自主机器人系统中心）；College of Engineering, Abu Dhabi University（阿布扎比大学工程学院）；Autonomous Robotics Research Center, Technology Innovation Institute（技术创新研究院自主机器人研究中心）
Detecting objects and their 6D poses from only RGB images is an important task for many robotic applications. While deep learning methods have made significant progress in visual object detection and segmentation, the object pose estimation task is still challenging. In this paper, we introduce an end-toend deep learning framework, named Deep-6DPose, that jointly detects, segments, and most importantly recovers 6D poses of object instances from a single RGB image. In particular, we extend the recent state-of-the-art instance segmentation network Mask R-CNN with a novel pose estimation branch t…
We propose an approach to estimate 3D human pose in real world units from a single RGBD image and show that it exceeds performance of monocular 3D pose estimation approaches from color as well as pose estimation exclusively from depth. Our approach builds on robust human keypoint detectors for color images and incorporates depth for lifting into 3D. We combine the system with our learning from demonstration framework to instruct a service robot without the need of markers. Experiments in real world settings demonstrate that our approach enables a PR2 robot to imitate manipulation actions obser…
RUSSO: Robust Underwater SLAM with Sonar Optimization against Visual Degradation
School of Mechanical Engineering and Automation, Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen（哈尔滨工业大学（深圳）机械工程与自动化学院）；School of Electrical and Information Engineering, Tianjin University（天津大学电气自动化与信息工程学院）
Current RGB-based 6D object pose estimation methods have achieved noticeable performance on datasets and real world applications. However, predicting 6D pose from single 2D image features is susceptible to disturbance from changing of environment and textureless or resemblant object surfaces. Hence, RGB-based methods generally achieve less competitive results than RGBD-based methods, which deploy both image features and 3D structure features. To narrow down this performance gap, this paper proposes a framework for 6D object pose estimation that learns implicit 3D information from 2 RGB images.…
De Montfort University（德蒙福特大学）；University of Lincoln（林肯大学）
In this paper, we propose mushrooms detection, localization and 3D pose estimation algorithm using RGB-D data acquired from a low-cost consumer RGB-D sensor. We use the RGB and depth information for different purposes. From RGB color, we first extract initial contour locations of the mushrooms and then provide both the initial contour locations and the original image to active contour for mushrooms segmentation. These segmented mushrooms are then used as input to a circular Hough transform for each mushroom detection including its center and radius. Once each mushroom's center position in the …
This paper proposes a novel system to estimate and track the 3D poses of multiple persons in calibrated RGB-Depth camera networks. The multi-view 3D pose of each person is computed by a central node which receives the single-view outcomes from each camera of the network. Each single-view outcome is computed by using a CNN for 2D pose estimation and extending the resulting skeletons to 3D by means of the sensor depth. The proposed system is marker-less, multi-person, independent of background and does not make any assumption on people appearance and initial pose. The system provides real-time o…
The underwater environment poses a complex problem for developing autonomous capabilities for Underwater Vehicle Manipulator Systems (UVMSs). The modeling of UVMSs is a complicated and costly process due to the highly nonlinear dynamics and the presence of unknown hydrodynamical effects. This is aggravated in tasks where the manipulation of objects is necessary, as this may not only introduce external disturbances that can lead to a fast degradation of the control system performance, but also requires the coordinating with a vision system for the correct grasping and operation of the object. I…
The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）；Microsoft Research Asia（微软亚洲研究院）；TransGP；Texas A&M University（德克萨斯农工大学）
Understanding dynamic hand motions and actions from egocentric RGB videos is a fundamental yet challenging task due to self-occlusion and ambiguity. To address occlusion and ambiguity, we develop a transformer-based framework to exploit temporal information for robust estimation. Noticing the different temporal granularity of and the semantic correlation between hand pose estimation and action recognition, we build a network hierarchy with two cascaded transformer encoders, where the first one exploits the short-term temporal cue for hand pose estimation, and the latter aggregates per-frame po…
NVIDIA（英伟达）；Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）
Prior work on 6-DoF object pose estimation has largely focused on instance-level processing, in which a textured CAD model is available for each object being detected. Category-level 6-DoF pose estimation represents an important step toward developing robotic vision systems that operate in unstructured, real-world scenarios. In this work, we propose a single-stage, keypoint-based approach for category-level object pose estimation that operates on unknown object instances within a known category using a single RGB image as input. The proposed network performs 2D object detection, detects 2D key…
This paper focuses on a robotic picking tasks in cluttered scenario. Because of the diversity of objects and clutter by placing, it is much difficult to recognize and estimate their pose before grasping. Here, we use U-net, a special Convolution Neural Networks (CNN), to combine RGB images and depth information to predict picking region without recognition and pose estimation. The efficiency of diverse visual input of the network were compared, including RGB, RGB-D and RGB-Points. And we found the RGB-Points input could get a precision of 95.74%.
George Mason University（乔治梅森大学）；Siemens Corporate Technology（西门子企业技术研究院）
We consider the problem of 3D object pose estimation. While much recent work has focused on the RGB domain, the reliance on accurately annotated images limits their generalizability and scalability. On the other hand, the easily available CAD models of objects are rich sources of data, providing a large number of synthetically rendered images. In this paper, we solve this key problem of existing methods requiring expensive 3D pose annotations by proposing a new method that matches RGB images to CAD models for object pose estimation. Our key innovations compared to existing work include removin…
3D object detection and pose estimation has been studied extensively in recent decades for its potential applications in robotics. However, there still remains challenges when we aim at detecting multiple objects while retaining low false positive rate in cluttered environments. This paper proposes a robust 3D object detection and pose estimation pipeline based on RGB-D images, which can detect multiple objects simultaneously while reducing false positives. Detection begins with template matching and yields a set of template matches. A clustering algorithm then groups templates of similar spat…
