An efficient and accurate visual SLAM loop closure detection algorithm

We present the performance evaluation of different whole-image descriptors in visual loop closure detection. A whole-image descriptor here is defined as the one that does not require keypoint detection and is therefore fast to extract. In addition, it can be extremely compact to reduce storage requirement. This type of image descriptors are attracting an increasing amount of interest in appearance-based SLAM or robot localization. Our evaluation is in the context of the previous works that have exploited a whole-image descriptor in the application of visual loop closure detection or robot localization. Several whole-image descriptors in three different categories are compared in our study. Our experiments are conducted on two outdoor datasets and the results show that although all these descriptors can be acceptable, they can provide significantly different performance depending upon the evaluation metrics.

There is an increased interest in the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles for load transportation from environmental remote sensing to construction and parcel delivery. One of the main challenges is accurate control of the load position and trajectory. This paper presents an assessment of real flight trials for the control of an autonomous multi-rotor with a suspended slung load using only visual feedback to determine the load position. This method uses an onboard camera to take advantage of a common visual marker detection algorithm to robustly detect the load location. The load position is calculated using an onboard processor, and transmitted over a wireless network to a ground station integrating MATLAB/SIMULINK and Robotic Operating System (ROS) and a Model Predictive Controller (MPC) to control both the load and the UAV. To evaluate the system performance, the position of the load determined by the visual detection system in real flight is compared with data received by a motion tracking system. The multi-rotor position tracking performance is also analyzed by conducting flight trials using perfect load position data and data obtained only from the visual system. Results show very accurate estimation of the load position (∼5% Offset) using only the visual system and demonstrate that the need for an external motion tracking system is not needed for this task.

Hand-crafted point descriptors have been traditionally used for visual loop closure detection. However, in low-textured environments, it is usually difficult to find enough point features and, hence, the performance of such algorithms degrade. Under this context, this paper proposes a loop closure detection method that combines lines and learned points to work, particularly, in scenarios where hand-crafted points fail. To index previous images, we adopt separate incremental binary Bag-of-Words (BoW) schemes for points and lines. Moreover, we adopt a binarization procedure for features’ descriptors to benefit from the advantages of learned features into a binary BoW model. Furthermore, image candidates from each BoW instance are merged using a novel query-adaptive late fusion approach. Finally, a spatial verification stage, which integrates appearance and geometry perspectives, allows us to enhance the global performance of the method. Our approach is validated using several public datasets, outperforming other state-of-the-art solutions in most cases, especially in low-textured scenarios.

With the growing interest of integrating robotics into everyday life and industry, the requirements towards the quality and quantity of applications grows equally hard. This trend is profoundly recognized in applications involving visual perception. Whereas visual sensing in home environments tend to be mainly used for recognition and localization, safety becomes the driving factor for developing intelligent visual control algorithms. More specifically, a robot operating in a human environment should not collide with obstacles and executed motion should be as smooth as possible. Furthermore, as the environment is not known on beforehand, a high demand on the robustness of visual processing is a necessity. On the other hand, in an industrial setting, the environment is known on beforehand and safety is mainly guaranteed by excluding a human operator. Despite these reasons, and the fact that visual servoing has gained much attention from industry to become a standard solution for robotic automation tasks, applications are highly simplified. For example, methods such as visual fault detection are already a mature technique in industrial manufacturing, where a fixed camera observes a product (e.g., on a conveyor belt) and checks whether it meets certain requirements. These operations can be executed at a fairly high rate due to the simplicity of the system (e.g., static camera) and the simplification of the processing task (e.g., binary images). For both areas the identified difficulties are similar. Foremost, this is the slow nature of (robust) visual processing, in respect to the ever growing demand of increasing speed and reducing delay. These two application areas with analogous limitations motivate the design of more direct approaches of vision in visual control systems. Therefore, in order to meet the requirements for next generation visual control systems, this thesis presents approaches which employ visual measurements as a direct feedback to design constrained motion. First, for industrial robotics, in order to obtain the required positioning accuracy, the measurement and fixation system have to be highly rigid and welldesigned, implying high cost and long design time. By measuring the position of objects directly with a camera, instead of indirectly by motor encoders, the requirements of the measurement and fixation system are less demanding. Moreover, this motivates the miniaturization of the complete control system. The approach is validated in experiments on a simplified 2D planar stage (i.e., considerable friction, poor fixation), which attains similar performance compared to encoder-based positioning systems. Secondly, in a human-centred environment, this direct sensing can improve traditional visual control systems, when subject to certain disturbances. More specifically, a method is proposed that uses an image-based feedforward controller on top of traditional position-based visual servo control to overcome disturbances such as friction or poorly designed local motor controllers. This visual feedforward control action is only active when an image-based error is present and vanishes when that error goes to zero. The method is validated on an anthropomorphic robotic manipulator with 7 degrees of freedom, intended for operation in the human care environment. Third, sensing the product directly gives rise to designing motion directly. Whereas in traditional approaches the motion trajectory is designed offline and can not be changed at runtime, direct trajectory generation computes the motion of the next step based on current state and events. This means that at any instance in time, the trajectory of a motion system can be altered with respect to certain desired kinematic or dynamic constraints. For industrial applications this makes manufacturing on near-repetitive or non-rigid structures (e.g. flexible displays) possible. When applied to a robotic manipulator, this enables obstacle avoidance to no longer be on path planning level, but on trajectory planning level, where kinematic or dynamic constraints can be taken into account. This results in a motion that is smoother than when obstacle avoidance with path planning is employed. For both application areas this direct trajectory generation method is implemented and shows high flexibility in constrained motion trajectory design.

<span lang="EN-US">Now a <span>days, huge amount of data is communicated through channels in wireless network. It requires an efficient parallel operation for the optimal utilization of frequency, time allocation and coding model for signal subspace factorization in smart antenna. In view of this requirement, an efficient reconfigurable optimal source detection and beam allocation algorithm (RoSDBA) is proposed. The proposed algorithm is able to allocate desired signal to the user space to reduce the noise and also for efficient allocation of subspace to remove disturbance in all directions. The proposed method efficiently utilizes the antenna array elements by accurate identification and allocation of antenna array elements such as individual radiators, radiation beam, signal strength, and disturbance factor. With respect to simulation analysis, the proposed method shows better performance for the resolution, radiation beam allocations, identification bias, distribution factor and time taken for the detection of various</span> array arrangements and source numbers.</span>

An efficient forgery detection algorithm for object removal by exemplar-based image inpainting

This paper presents a concise, efficient, and adaptive step detection algorithm based on foot-mounted inertial measurement unit sensors. The proposed method maps the temporal values of pedestrian motion and gait diversity into two variables: the distance between peaks and valleys, and the slope. Compared to traditional sliding window methods, this approach amplifies the differences between normal and abnormal steps, allowing it to adapt to various indoor activities such as fast walking, slow walking, running, jogging, standing still, and turning. By incorporating adaptive factors, it addresses the challenge of detecting steps while going up and down stairs. The proposed algorithm overcomes the limitations of traditional adaptive threshold methods that require different temporal and peak thresholds for various gait conditions. By utilizing the significant differences in distance and slope, it effectively resolves the issue of detecting steps during stationary periods. Unlike neural network-based gait classifiers, this algorithm does not need to account for multiple gait conditions, thereby simplifying the training process. Experimental results demonstrate that the algorithm achieves an average accuracy of over 99% under mixed indoor walking conditions and over 98% accuracy in long-term outdoor walking conditions.

Community detection is an important and crucial problem in complex network analysis. Although classical modularity function optimization approaches are widely used for identifying communities, the modularity function (Q) suffers from its resolution limit. Recently, the surprise function (S) was experimentally proved to be better than the Q function. However, up until now, there has been no algorithm available to perform searches to directly determine the maximal surprise values. In this paper, considering the superiority of the S function over the Q function, we propose an efficient community detection algorithm called AGSO (algorithm based on greedy surprise optimization) and its improved version FAGSO (fast-AGSO), which are based on greedy surprise optimization and do not suffer from the resolution limit. In addition, (F)AGSO does not need the number of communities K to be specified in advance. Tests on experimental networks show that (F)AGSO is able to detect optimal partitions in both simple and even more complex networks. Moreover, algorithms based on surprise maximization perform better than those algorithms based on modularity maximization, including Blondel–Guillaume–Lambiotte–Lefebvre (BGLL), Clauset–Newman–Moore (CNM) and the other state-of-the-art algorithms such as Infomap, order statistics local optimization method (OSLOM) and label propagation algorithm (LPA).

Visual loop closure detection plays a key role in navigation systems for intelligent vehicles. Nowadays, state-of-the-art algorithms are focused on unidirectional loop closures, but there are situations where they are not sufficient for identifying previously visited places. Therefore, the detection of bidirectional loop closures when a place is revisited in a different direction provides a more robust visual navigation. We propose a novel approach for identifying bidirectional loop closures on panoramic image sequences. Our proposal combines global binary descriptors and a matching strategy based on cross-correlation of sub-panoramas, which are defined as the different parts of a panorama. A set of experiments considering several binary descriptors (ORB, BRISK, FREAK, LDB) is provided, where LDB excels as the most suitable. The proposed matching proffers a reliable bidirectional loop closure detection, which is not efficiently solved in any other previous research. Our method is successfully validated and compared against FAB-MAP and BRIEF-Gist. The Ford Campus and the Oxford New College datasets are considered for evaluation.

With the current rapid development of robotics technology and intelligent industrial transportation systems, the algorithms of Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) for Automated Guided Vehicles (AGV) receive more and more researchers’ attentions. In current stage, a big challenge is how to effectively improve the pose accuracy of AGVs. When a visual SLAM has been running for a long time, the position estimation errors between frames are usually inevitably generated and accumulated to the next state, which will eventually cause the AGVs to produce pose drifts. To solve this problem, it is necessary to perform a Loop Closure Detection (LCD) and perform inter-frame constraints for remote frames. In this paper, a LCD based on a Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition (VGG-19) network is proposed for improving the pose accuracies of AGVs. Experimental results show that the accuracy of this method is 6.5% higher than that of traditional Bag of Words (BoW) method.

Hyperspectral image contains various wavelength channels and the corresponding imagery processing requires a computation platform with high performance. Target and anomaly detection on hyperspectral image has been concerned because of its practicality in many real-time detection fields while wider applicability is limited by the computing condition and low processing speed. The field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) offer the possibility of on-board hyperspectral data processing with high speed, low-power consumption, reconfigurability and radiation tolerance. In this paper, we develop a novel FPGA-based technique for efficient real-time target detection algorithm in hyperspectral images. The collaborative representation is an efficient target detection (CRD) algorithm in hyperspectral imagery, which is directly based on the concept that the target pixels can be approximately represented by its spectral signatures, while the other cannot. To achieve high processing speed on FPGAs platform, the CRD algorithm reduces the dimensionality of hyperspectral image first. The Sherman–Morrison formula is utilized to calculate the matrix inversion to reduce the complexity of overall CRD algorithm. The achieved results demonstrate that the proposed system may obtains shorter processing time of the CRD algorithm than that on 3.40 GHz CPU.

In this work, fast and efficient appearance-based methods for visual loop-closure detection are proposed. The widely used technique based on the Bag-of-Words image representation has shown some limitations especially with aliasing problem. In this work, however, an appearance-based approach for loop closure detection using local invariant and colour features is proposed. The first technique uses Bayes Decision Theory for loop closure detection based on Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM). A new technique based on the combination of GMM with the KD-Tree data structure is presented as well. The techniques have been validated using monocular image sequences from several environments.

Vehicle detection in aerial images has attracted great attention as an approach to providing the necessary information for transportation road network planning and traffic management. However, because of the low resolution, complex scene, occlusion, shadows, and high requirement for detection efficiency, implementing vehicle detection in aerial images is challenging. Therefore, we propose an efficient and scene-adaptive algorithm for vehicle detection in aerial images using an improved YOLOv3 framework, and it is applied to not only aerial still images but also videos composed of consecutive frame images. First, rather than directly using the traditional YOLOv3 network, we construct a new structure with fewer layers to improve the detection efficiency. Then, since complex scenes in aerial images can cause the partial occlusion of vehicles, we construct a context-aware-based feature map fusion to make full use of the information in the adjacent frames and accurately detect partially occluded vehicles. The traditional YOLOv3 network adopts a horizontal bounding box, which can attain the expected detection effects only for vehicles with small length–width ratio. Moreover, vehicles that are close to each other are liable to cause lower accuracy and a higher detection error rate. Hence, we design a sloping bounding box attached to the angle of the target vehicles. This modification is conducive to predicting not only the position but also the angle. Finally, two data sets were used to perform extensive experiments and comparisons. The results show that the proposed algorithm generates the desired and excellent performance.

ABSTRACTAccurate positioning for autonomous driven underground mining vehicles (UMVs) and coal mine robots (CMRs) is indeed one of the cores in the intelligentization of coal mining. Completely different from positioning on the ground and in parking scenes, there will be great difficulties in realizing the accurate active positioning for UMVs shuttled in dark and narrow roadways. We propose an effective visual and inertial fusion positioning method for autonomous CMRs and roadheaders in challenging roadway scenarios based on the odometer‐aided inertial navigation system and visual pose estimation system. Velocity information of the odometer is adapted to restrain the error accumulation of inertial positioning based on a Kalman filter. The hybrid visual feature detection algorithm is put forward to improve the accuracy and robustness of visual observation information in a dark environment. Autonomous experiments for CMRs and roadheaders are separately performed in the narrow roadway and dark passageway to demonstrate the applicability of our localization method. The proposed approach outperforms the subsystems and existing methods in accuracy and has outstanding stability.

Vehicle detection is an important research problem for Advanced Driver Assistance Systems to improve driving safety. Most existing methods are based on the sliding window search framework to locate vehicles in an image. However, such methods usually produce large numbers of false positives and are computationally intensive. In this paper, we propose an efficient vehicle detection algorithm that dramatically reduces the search space based on the perspective geometry of the road. In the training phase, we search a few images to locate all possible vehicle regions by using the standard HOG-based vehicle detector. Pairs of vehicle candidates that satisfy the projective geometry constraints are used to estimate the linear vehicle width model with respect to y coordinates in the image. Then an adaptive scan strategy based on the estimated vehicle width model is proposed to efficiently detect vehicles in an image. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm provides improved performance in terms of both speed and accuracy compared to standard sliding-windows search strategy.