Person:
Dellaert, Frank

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Now showing 1 - 6 of 6
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Detecting and Matching Repeated Patterns for Automatic Geo-tagging in Urban Environments

2008-06 , Schindler, Grant , Krishnamurthy, Panchapagesan , Lublinerman, Roberto , Liu, Yanxi , Dellaert, Frank

We present a novel method for automatically geo-tagging photographs of man-made environments via detection and matching of repeated patterns. Highly repetitive environments introduce numerous correspondence ambiguities and are problematic for traditional wide-baseline matching methods. Our method exploits the highly repetitive nature of urban environments, detecting multiple perspectively distorted periodic 2D patterns in an image and matching them to a 3D database of textured facades by reasoning about the underlying canonical forms of each pattern. Multiple 2D-to-3D pattern correspondences enable robust recovery of camera orientation and location. We demonstrate the success of this method in a large urban environment.

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Learning and Inferring Motion Patterns Using Parametric Segmental Switching Linear Dynamic Systems

2008 , Oh, Sang Min , Rehg, James M. , Balch, Tucker , Dellaert, Frank

Switching Linear Dynamic System (SLDS) models are a popular technique for modeling complex nonlinear dynamic systems. An SLDS provides the possibility to describe complex temporal patterns more concisely and accurately than an HMM by using continuous hidden states. However, the use of SLDS models in practical applications is challenging for several reasons. First, exact inference in SLDS models is computationally intractable. Second, the geometric duration model induced in standard SLDSs limits their representational power. Third, standard SLDSs do not provide a systematic way to robustly interpret systematic variations governed by higher order parameters. The contributions in this paper address all three challenges above. First, we present a data-driven MCMC sampling method for SLDSs as a robust and efficient approximate inference method. Second, we present segmental switching linear dynamic systems (S-SLDS), where the geometric distributions are replaced with arbitrary duration models. Third, we extend the standard model with a parametric model that can capture systematic temporal and spatial variations. The resulting parametric SLDS model (P-SLDS) uses EM to robustly interpret parametrized motions by incorporating additional global parameters that underly systematic variations of the overall motion. The overall development of the proposed inference methods and extensions for SLDSs provide a robust framework to interpret complex motions. The framework is applied to the honey bee dance interpretation task in the context of the on-going BioTracking project at Georgia Institute of Technology. The experimental results suggest that the enhanced models provide an effective framework for a wide range of motion analysis applications.

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2007 RoboCup International Symposium

2008-05 , Balch, Tucker , Dellaert, Frank

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iSAM: Incremental Smoothing and Mapping

2008 , Kaess, Michael , Ranganathan, Ananth , Dellaert, Frank

We present incremental smoothing and mapping (iSAM), a novel approach to the simultaneous localization and mapping problem that is based on fast incremental matrix factorization. iSAM provides an efficient and exact solution by updating a QR factorization of the naturally sparse smoothing information matrix, therefore recalculating only the matrix entries that actually change. iSAM is efficient even for robot trajectories with many loops as it avoids unnecessary fill-in in the factor matrix by periodic variable reordering. Also, to enable data association in real-time, we provide efficient algorithms to access the estimation uncertainties of interest based on the factored information matrix. We systematically evaluate the different components of iSAM as well as the overall algorithm using various simulated and real-world datasets for both landmark and pose-only settings.

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Place Recognition-Based Fixed-Lag Smoothing for Environments with Unreliable GPS

2008-05 , Mottaghi, Roozbeh , Kaess, Michael , Ranganathan, Ananth , Roberts, Richard , Dellaert, Frank

Pose estimation of outdoor robots presents some distinct challenges due to the various uncertainties in the robot sensing and action. In particular, global positioning sensors of outdoor robots do not always work perfectly, causing large drift in the location estimate of the robot. To overcome this common problem, we propose a new approach for global localization using place recognition. First, we learn the location of some arbitrary key places using odometry measurements and GPS measurements only at the start and the end of the robot trajectory. In subsequent runs, when the robot perceives a key place, our fixed-lag smoother fuses odometry measurements with the relative location to the key place to improve its pose estimate. Outdoor mobile robot experiments show that place recognition measurements significantly improve the estimate of the smoother in the absence of GPS measurements.

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Automatic Landmark Detection for Topological Mapping Using Bayesian Surprise

2008 , Ranganathan, Ananth , Dellaert, Frank

Topological maps are graphical representations of the environment consisting of nodes that denote landmarks, and edges that represent the connectivity between the landmarks. Automatic detection of landmarks, usually special places in the environment such as gateways, in a general, sensor-independent manner has proven to be a difficult task. We present a landmark detection scheme based on the notion of “surprise” that addresses these issues. The surprise associated with a measurement is defined as the change in the current model upon updating it using the measurement. We demonstrate that surprise is large when sudden changes in the environment occur, and hence, is a good indicator of landmarks. We evaluate our landmark detector using appearance and laser measurements both qualitatively and quantitatively. Part of this evaluation is performed in the context of a topological mapping algorithm, thus demonstrating the practical applicability of the detector.