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Dellaert, Frank

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Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
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GroupSAC: Efficient Consensus in the Presence of Groupings

2009-09 , Ni, Kai , Jin, Hailin , Dellaert, Frank

We present a novel variant of the RANSAC algorithm that is much more efficient, in particular when dealing with problems with low inlier ratios. Our algorithm assumes that there exists some grouping in the data, based on which we introduce a new binomial mixture model rather than the simple binomial model as used in RANSAC. We prove that in the new model it is more efficient to sample data from a smaller numbers of groups and groups with more tentative correspondences, which leads to a new sampling procedure that uses progressive numbers of groups. We demonstrate our algorithm on two classical geometric vision problems: wide-baseline matching and camera resectioning. The experiments show that the algorithm serves as a general framework that works well with three possible grouping strategies investigated in this paper, including a novel optical flow based clustering approach. The results show that our algorithm is able to achieve a significant performance gain compared to the standard RANSAC and PROSAC.

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Tectonic SAM: Exact, Out-of-Core, Submap-Based SLAM

2007-04 , Ni, Kai , Steedly, Drew , Dellaert, Frank

Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) is a method that robots use to explore, navigate, and map an unknown environment. However, this method poses inherent problems with regard to cost and time. To lower computation costs, smoothing and mapping (SAM) approaches have shown some promise, and they also provide more accurate solutions than filtering approaches in realistic scenarios. However, in SAM approaches, updating the linearization is still the most time-consuming step. To mitigate this problem, we propose a submap-based approach, Tectonic SAM, in which the original optimization problem is solved by using a divide-and-conquer scheme. Submaps are optimized independently and parameterized relative to a local coordinate frame. During the optimization, the global position of the submap may change dramatically, but the positions of the nodes in the submap relative to the local coordinate frame do not change very much. The key contribution of this paper is to show that the linearization of the submaps can be cached and reused when they are combined into a global map. According to the results of both simulation and real experiments, Tectonic SAM drastically speeds up SAM in very large environments while still maintaining its global accuracy.

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Flow Separation for Fast and Robust Stereo Odometry

2009-05 , Kaess, Michael , Ni, Kai , Dellaert, Frank

Separating sparse flow provides fast and robust stereo visual odometry that deals with nearly degenerate situations that often arise in practical applications.We make use of the fact that in outdoor situations different constraints are provided by close and far structure, where the notion of close depends on the vehicle speed. The motion of distant features determines the rotational component that we recover with a robust two-point algorithm. Once the rotation is known, we recover the translational component from close features using a robust one-point algorithm. The overall algorithm is faster than estimating the motion in one step by a standard RANSAC-based three-point algorithm. And in contrast to other visual odometry work, we avoid the problem of nearly degenerate data, under which RANSAC is known to return inconsistent results. We confirm our claims on data from an outdoor robot equipped with a stereo rig.

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Stereo Tracking and Three-Point/One-Point Algorithms - A Robust Approach in Visual Odometry

2006-10 , Ni, Kai , Dellaert, Frank

In this paper, we present an approach of calculating visual odometry for outdoor robots equipped with a stereo rig. Instead of the typical feature matching or tracking, we use an improved stereo-tracking method that simultaneously decides the feature displacement in both cameras. Based on the matched features, a three-point algorithm for the resulting quadrifocal setting is carried out in a RANSAC framework to recover the unknown odometry. In addition, the change in rotation can be derived from infinity homography, and the remaining translational unknowns can be obtained even faster consequently . Both approaches are quite robust and deal well with challenging conditions such as wheel slippage.

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Out-of-Core Bundle Adjustment for Large-Scale 3D Reconstruction

2007-10 , Ni, Kai , Steedly, Drew , Dellaert, Frank

Large-scale 3D reconstruction has recently received much attention from the computer vision community. Bundle adjustment is a key component of 3D reconstruction problems. However, traditional bundle adjustment algorithms require a considerable amount of memory and computational resources. In this paper, we present an extremely efficient, inherently out-of-core bundle adjustment algorithm. We decouple the original problem into several submaps that have their own local coordinate systems and can be optimized in parallel. A key contribution to our algorithm is making as much progress towards optimizing the global non-linear cost function as possible using the fragments of the reconstruction that are currently in core memory. This allows us to converge with very few global sweeps (often only two) through the entire reconstruction. We present experimental results on large-scale 3D reconstruction datasets, both synthetic and real.