Coarse Pose Registration Using Local Geometric Features

An unsupervised point cloud object retrieval and pose estimation method, called PCRP, is proposed in this work. It is assumed that there exists a gallery point cloud set that contains point cloud objects with given pose orientation information. PCRP attempts to register the unknown point cloud object with those in the gallery set so as to achieve content-based object retrieval and pose estimation jointly, where the point cloud registration task is built upon an enhanced version of the unsupervised R-PointHop method. Experiments on the ModelNet40 dataset demonstrate the superior performance of PCRP in comparison with traditional and learning based methods.

Currently, many methods of object pose estimation use images or point clouds alone for pose estimation. This leads to their inability to accurately estimate the object pose in the case of occlusion and poor illumination. Second, these models have large parameters and cannot be deployed on mobile devices. Therefore, we propose a lightweight two-terminal feature fusion network, which can effectively use images and point clouds for accurate object pose estimation. First, Pointno problemNet network is used to extract point cloud features. Then the extracted point cloud features are combined with the images at pixel level and the features are extracted by CNN. Secondly, the extracted image features are combined with the point cloud point by point. Then feature extraction is performed on it using the improved PointNet++ network. Finally, a set of center point features are obtained and pose estimation is performed for each feature. The pose with the highest confidence is selected as the final result. Furthermore, we apply depthwise separable convolutions to reduce the amount of model parameters. Experiments show that the proposed method exhibits better performance on Linemod and Occlusion Linemod datasets. Furthermore, the model parameters are small, and it is robust in occlusion and low-light situations.

This paper presents a novel approach to recognize and estimate pose of the 3D objects in cluttered range images. The key technical breakthrough of the developed approach can enable robust object recognition and localization under undesirable condition such as environmental illumination variation as well as optical occlusion to viewing the object partially. First, the acquired point clouds are segmented into individual object point clouds based on the developed 3D object segmentation for randomly stacked objects. Second, an efficient shape-matching algorithm called Sub-OBB based object recognition by using the proposed oriented bounding box (OBB) regional area-based descriptor is performed to reliably recognize the object. Then, the 3D position and orientation of the object can be roughly estimated by aligning the OBB of segmented object point cloud with OBB of matched point cloud in a database generated from CAD model and 3D virtual camera. To detect accurate pose of the object, the iterative closest point (ICP) algorithm is used to match the object model with the segmented point clouds. From the feasibility test of several scenarios, the developed approach is verified to be feasible for object pose recognition and localization.

Smart mobile device and consumer level 3D visual sensor are becoming very cheap and widely accessible in people's daily lives. Visual information based indoor localization is getting more and more attention in the computer vision research community to achieve real time and precise localization result. In this paper, we present a 6-degree-of-freedom (6-DoF) pose estimation using a portable 3D visual sensor mounted on a mobile device. A detailed 3D model and a WiFi received signal strength model of the indoor environment are constructed in the offline training phase. During the online localization, we first use WiFi signals to locate the device in a 3D sub model. The initial pose is calculated through feature matching between the online captured 2D image and the key frame images used to build the 3D model. Then we employ iterative closest point (ICP) algorithm to estimate the rigid transform between online captured 3D point cloud and local 3D point cloud. The 6-DOF pose estimation is further refined by random sample consensus (RANSAC) algorithm. We implement the system on iOS platform and the experiments carried out in an indoor environment shows promising result of our approach. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first portable 3D visual sensor based indoor localization system on mobile device.

LiDAR point cloud is essential for autonomous vehicles, but motion distortions from dynamic objects degrade the data quality. While previous work has considered distortions caused by ego motion, distortions caused by other moving objects remain largely overlooked, leading to errors in object shape and position. This distortion is particularly pronounced in high-speed environments such as highways and in multi-LiDAR configurations, a common setup for heavy vehicles. To address this challenge, we introduce HiMo, a pipeline that repurposes scene flow estimation for non-ego motion compensation, correcting the representation of dynamic objects in point clouds. During the development of HiMo, we observed that existing self-supervised scene flow estimators often produce degenerate or inconsistent estimates under high-speed distortion. We further propose SeFlow++, a real-time scene flow estimator that achieves state-of-the-art performance on both scene flow and motion compensation. Since well-established motion distortion metrics are absent in the literature, we introduce two evaluation metrics: compensation accuracy at a point level and shape similarity of objects. We validate HiMo through extensive experiments on Argoverse 2, ZOD and a newly collected real-world dataset featuring highway driving and multi-LiDAR-equipped heavy vehicles. Our findings show that HiMo improves the geometric consistency and visual fidelity of dynamic objects in LiDAR point clouds, benefiting downstream tasks such as semantic segmentation and 3D detection. See https://kin-zhang.github.io/HiMo for more details.

A pose (relative attitude and position) estimation approach to support proximity operations such as autonomous landing of unmanned air vehicles or spacecraft on-orbit servicing is investigated in this paper. An algorithm is developed based on a feature detection capability using the point cloud data that a flash lidar (light detection and ranging) produces. The feature refers to an edge, a corner, or a distinct geometrical shape of an object. Once features are detected, orthogonal triads that are attached to the object are constructed using them. Pose estimation is then performed based on the orientation of the triads with respect to the lidar sensor frame. Since the algorithm employs detected features, it allows pose estimation of an object from a single set of point cloud data. In contrast, the conventional iterative closest point based algorithms typically require two sets of point cloud data. The estimated pose thus represents the changes in pose between the two data sets, leaving the pose of the object with respect to the sensor still to be determined. This featurebased pose estimation capability performs directly an initial pose acquisition with respect to the sensor. The algorithm may also help reduce the number of data points required for pose estimation since a small, selected feature of an object within the sensor field of view can be employed to estimate the pose. Employing the algorithm developed, pose estimation tests were conducted and their preliminary results are presented, which were obtained using a flash lidar in a laboratory testing environment.

As 3D acquisition technology develops and 3D sensors become increasingly affordable, large quantities of 3D point cloud data are emerging. How to effectively learn and extract the geometric features from these point clouds has become an urgent problem to be solved. The point cloud geometric information is hidden in disordered, unstructured points, making point cloud analysis a very challenging problem. To address this problem, we propose a novel network framework, called Tree Graph Network (TGNet), which can sample, group, and aggregate local geometric features. Specifically, we construct a Tree Graph by explicit rules, which consists of curves extending in all directions in point cloud feature space, and then aggregate the features of the graph through a cross-attention mechanism. In this way, we incorporate more point cloud geometric structure information into the representation of local geometric features, which makes our network perform better. Our model performs well on several basic point clouds processing tasks such as classification, segmentation, and normal estimation, demonstrating the effectiveness and superiority of our network. Furthermore, we provide ablation experiments and visualizations to better understand our network.

Although many mesh generation methods have been developed, difficulties still exist in generating high-quality structured hex-meshes for specific local geometric features such as holes and columns in three-dimensional models. In this paper, a mesh generation approach is proposed to overcome the problem of meshing local features having regular structure with high quality. Firstly, analyze the feature's geometry information and customize its mesh process. Secondly, introduce parametric design into the optimization of mesh customization. Scaled Jacobian and aspect ratio are taken as indexes of the objective functions. Thirdly, an optimized module of the feature is set up by integrating the meshing scheme into program. By establishing a knowledge base of optimized modules corresponding to geometric features, a local feature can be automatically meshed according to its geometry information. Experiments in this paper reveal that the method is applicable and stable for generating high-quality meshes for local geometric features with regular structure.

The next generation of service robots is to offer services relying heavily on visually guided manipulation, besides navigation, such services as errand, logistics, appliance, home keeping, etc. For the successful introduction of these services, it is critical to establish the consumer-level dependability in 3D object recognition and pose estimation in a natural setting where a large variation of environment, e.g., perspective, texture, form factor, illumination, occlusion, etc., is common. To address this problem, we propose an approach of the two-layered particle filter to the dependability in 3D object recognition and pose estimation. In the upper layer, a set of object pose candidates is identified and maintained in the search space as a set of super-particles, each of which is assigned a probability of the true pose and evolved in time along with the accumulation of further evidences. To define the object pose candidates, first, we acquire initially weak evidences quickly and interpret them in terms of possible object poses in space. These interpretations serve as the region of interest for detailed investigation by which the pose probabilities are computed for individual interpretations based on the likelihood and unlikelihood of various features available in the corresponding regions of interest. During the process of probability computation, we select the object pose candidates to be used as super-particles in the upper layer. In the lower level, the pose uncertainties associated with the individual candidates are represented as particles that are subject to the propagation in time. Finally, the experimental results support the strength of the proposed approach in the real environment in terms of its dependability in 3D object recognition and pose estimation.

In recent years, machine vision has played an important role in product surface quality detection. The promotion and use of this technology have largely avoided the subjectivity caused by human detection and improved detection efficiency and accuracy. Different from the image data commonly used in machine vision, point cloud can describe the spatial structure of an object, provide more information than image data, and have the ability to expand the data to build multi-dimensional data models. Due to the strong anti-interference ability of point cloud sensors and the high accuracy of three-dimensional positioning information point cloud, nondestructive testing technology based on point cloud has received more and more attention. This paper summarizes the research progress of product surface quality detection methods based on 3D point cloud in recent years. According to different data processing methods, the detection research is divided into five categories: based on point cloud contour, based on local geometric feature, based on template matching, based on multimodal point cloud, and based on deep learning. The five methods are reviewed and summarized respectively. Finally, the key problems of each detection method and the future trend of product surface quality detection technology based on 3D point cloud are discussed.

We present a perception system for mobile manipulation tasks. The primary design goal of the proposed system is to minimize human interaction during system setup which is achieved by several means, such as automatic training data generation, the use of simulated training data, and 3D model based geometric matching. We employ a state-of-the art deep-learning based bounding box detector for rough localization of objects and a Point Pair Feature based matching algorithm for 6DoF pose estimation. The proposed approach shows promising results on our recently published dataset for industrial object detection and pose estimation. Furthermore, the system’s performance during four days of live operation at the Automatica 2018 trade fair is analyzed and failure cases are presented and discussed.

In this paper, we propose a 3D object pose estimation method based on the frustum point cloud for industrial picking robot to grab the express. The core of our idea is to segment the point cloud of the object which should to be pick up first, then extract the best grab plane and grab point on the object point cloud. First of all, a mature 2D detection framework Faster RCNN is used to detect the object in RGB images. Then the 2D bounding box and category of the object closest to the camera will be output. On the basis of this, the frustum point cloud data of the detected object is generated by the combination of the depth map and the projection relationship of the RGB-D camera. Then we used PointNet network to extract the feature of each point in the generated frustum point cloud. Finally, the instance segmentation of the point cloud and the subsequent extraction of the best grab plane and grab point are performed. We show results on both real dataset and synthetic dataset which we collected by ourselves, and our 3D instance segmentation network accuracy on real dataset reached 88%.

Direct immersogeometric fluid flow and heat transfer analysis of objects represented by point clouds

With the advancement of intelligent manufacturing, robots are increasingly involved in industrial production, for example, replacing human beings to identify and manipulate objects. However, it is still a challenging task for object recognition and pose estimation in industrial environment, especially under large environmental noise, mutual occlusions and high-speed requirements. In this paper, we propose a new method for 6D object pose estimation, Super Key 4-Points Congruent Sets (SK-4PCS), which is a fast global method combined with local features. The proposed method includes three steps. Firstly, the key points in 3D point clouds are extracted by local features, which are invariant with respect to rotation and translation. Secondly, the smart indexing scheme is used to realize the query of 4-points congruent sets globally. Finally, the coarse pose obtained quickly is further refined by the Iteration Closest Point algorithm (ICP) [1]. The proposed method is also compared with existing methods by the evaluation indicator Visible Surface Discrepancy (VSD) on the LINEMOD dataset [2]. The experimental results show that the refined SK-4PCS results in significant speedup and satisfactory accuracy in 6D object pose estimation.

In this paper, we propose PointRCNN for 3D object detection from raw point cloud. The whole framework is composed of two stages: stage-1 for the bottom-up 3D proposal generation and stage-2 for refining proposals in the canonical coordinates to obtain the final detection results. Instead of generating proposals from RGB image or projecting point cloud to bird's view or voxels as previous methods do, our stage-1 sub-network directly generates a small number of high-quality 3D proposals from point cloud in a bottom-up manner via segmenting the point cloud of the whole scene into foreground points and background. The stage-2 sub-network transforms the pooled points of each proposal to canonical coordinates to learn better local spatial features, which is combined with global semantic features of each point learned in stage-1 for accurate box refinement and confidence prediction. Extensive experiments on the 3D detection benchmark of KITTI dataset show that our proposed architecture outperforms state-of-the-art methods with remarkable margins by using only point cloud as input. The code is available at https://github.com/sshaoshuai/PointRCNN.