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Motion estimation is an essential element for autonomous vessels. It is used e.g. for lidar motion compensation as well as mapping and detection tasks in a maritime environment. Because the use of gyroscopes is not reliable and a high performance inertial measurement unit is quite expensive, we present an approach for visual pitch and roll estimation that utilizes a convolutional neural network for water segmentation, a stereo system for reconstruction and simple geometry to estimate pitch and roll. The algorithm is validated on a novel, publicly available dataset recorded at Lake Constance. Our experiments show that the pitch and roll estimator provides accurate results in comparison to an Xsens IMU sensor. We can further improve the pitch and roll estimation by sensor fusion with a gyroscope. The algorithm is available in its implementation as a ROS node.
Targetless Lidar-camera registration is a repeating task in many computer vision and robotics applications and requires computing the extrinsic pose of a point cloud with respect to a camera or vice-versa. Existing methods based on learning or optimization lack either generalization capabilities or accuracy. Here, we propose a combination of pre-training and optimization using a neural network-based mutual information estimation technique (MINE [1]). This construction allows back-propagating the gradient to the calibration parameters and enables stochastic gradient descent. To ensure orthogonality constraints with respect to the rotation matrix we incorporate Lie-group techniques. Furthermore, instead of optimizing on entire images, we operate on local patches that are extracted from the temporally synchronized projected Lidar points and camera frames. Our experiments show that this technique not only improves over existing techniques in terms of accuracy, but also shows considerable generalization capabilities towards new Lidar-camera configurations.
Mapping of tree seedlings is useful for tasks ranging from monitoring natural succession and regeneration to effective silvicultural management. Development of methods that are both accurate and cost-effective is especially important considering the dramatic increase in tree planting that is required globally to mitigate the impacts of climate change. The combination of high-resolution imagery from unmanned aerial vehicles and object detection by convolutional neural networks (CNNs) is one promising approach. However, unbiased assessments of these models and methods to integrate them into geospatial workflows are lacking. In this study, we present a method for rapid, large-scale mapping of young conifer seedlings using CNNs applied to RGB orthomosaic imagery. Importantly, we provide an unbiased assessment of model performance by using two well-characterised trial sites together containing over 30,000 seedlings to assemble datasets with a high level of completeness. Our results showed CNN-based models trained on two sites detected seedlings with sensitivities of 99.5% and 98.8%. False positives due to tall weeds at one site and naturally regenerating seedlings of the same species led to slightly lower precision of 98.5% and 96.7%. A model trained on examples from both sites had 99.4% sensitivity and precision of 97%, showing applicability across sites. Additional testing showed that the CNN model was able to detect 68.7% of obscured seedlings missed during the initial annotation of the imagery but present in the field data. Finally, we demonstrate the potential to use a form of weakly supervised training and a tile-based processing chain to enhance the accuracy and efficiency of CNNs applied to large, high-resolution orthomosaics.
Three-dimensional ship localization with only one camera is a challenging task due to the loss of depth information caused by perspective projection. In this paper, we propose a method to measure distances based on the assumption that ships lie on a flat surface. This assumption allows to recover depth from a single image using the principle of inverse perspective. For the 3D ship detection task, we use a hybrid approach that combines image detection with a convolutional neural network, camera geometry and inverse perspective. Furthermore, a novel calculation of object height is introduced. Experiments show that the monocular distance computation works well in comparison to a Velodyne lidar. Due to its robustness, this could be an easy-to-use baseline method for detection tasks in navigation systems.
Multi-Dimensional Connectionist Classification is amethod for weakly supervised training of Deep Neural Networksfor segmentation-free multi-line offline handwriting recognition.MDCC applies Conditional Random Fields as an alignmentfunction for this task. We discuss the structure and patterns ofhandwritten text that can be used for building a CRF. Since CRFsare cyclic graphical models, we have to resort to approximateinference when calculating the alignment of multi-line text duringtraining, here in the form of Loopy Belief Propagation. This workconcludes with experimental results for transcribing small multi-line samples from the IAM Offline Handwriting DB which showthat MDCC is a competitive methodology.
Knot placement for curve approximation is a well known and yet open problem in geometric modeling. Selecting knot values that yield good approximations is a challenging task, based largely on heuristics and user experience. More advanced approaches range from parametric averaging to genetic algorithms.
In this paper, we propose to use Support Vector Machines (SVMs) to determine suitable knot vectors for B-spline curve approximation. The SVMs are trained to identify locations in a sequential point cloud where knot placement will improve the approximation error. After the training phase, the SVM can assign, to each point set location, a so-called score. This score is based on geometric and differential geometric features of points. It measures the quality of each location to be used as knots in the subsequent approximation. From these scores, the final knot vector can be constructed exploring the topography of the score-vector without the need for iteration or optimization in the approximation process. Knot vectors computed with our approach outperform state of the art methods and yield tighter approximations.
Deep neural networks have been successfully applied to problems such as image segmentation, image super-resolution, coloration and image inpainting. In this work we propose the use of convolutional neural networks (CNN) for image inpainting of large regions in high-resolution textures. Due to limited computational resources processing high-resolution images with neural networks is still an open problem. Existing methods separate inpainting of global structure and the transfer of details, which leads to blurry results and loss of global coherence in the detail transfer step. Based on advances in texture synthesis using CNNs we propose patch-based image inpainting by a single network topology that is able to optimize for global as well as detail texture statistics. Our method is capable of filling large inpainting regions, oftentimes exceeding quality of comparable methods for images of high-resolution (2048x2048px). For reference patch look-up we propose to use the same summary statistics that are used in the inpainting process.
In this paper we present a method using deep learning to compute parametrizations for B-spline curve approximation. Existing methods consider the computation of parametric values and a knot vector as separate problems. We propose to train interdependent deep neural networks to predict parametric values and knots. We show that it is possible to include B-spline curve approximation directly into the neural network architecture. The resulting parametrizations yield tight approximations and are able to outperform state-of-the-art methods.
Visualization-Assisted Development of Deep Learning Models in Offline Handwriting Recognition
(2018)
Deep learning is a field of machine learning that has been the focus of active research and successful applications in recent years. Offline handwriting recognition is one of the research fields and applications were deep neural networks have shown high accuracy. Deep learning models and their training pipeline show a large amount of hyper-parameters in their data selection, transformation, network topology and training process that are sometimes interdependent. This increases the overall difficulty and time necessary for building and training a model for a specific data set and task at hand. This work proposes a novel visualization-assisted workflow that guides the model developer through the hyper-parameter search in order to identify relevant parameters and modify them in a meaningful way. This decreases the overall time necessary for building and training a model. The contributions of this work are a workflow for hyper-parameter search in offline handwriting recognition and a heat map based visualization technique for deep neural networks in multi-line offline handwriting recognition. This work applies to offline handwriting recognition, but the general workflow can possibly be adapted to other tasks as well.
Optical surface inspection: A novelty detection approach based on CNN-encoded texture features
(2018)
In inspection systems for textured surfaces, a reference texture is typically known before novel examples are inspected. Mostly, the reference is only available in a digital format. As a consequence, there is no dataset of defective examples available that could be used to train a classifier. We propose a texture model approach to novelty detection. The texture model uses features encoded by a convolutional neural network (CNN) trained on natural image data. The CNN activations represent the specific characteristics of the digital reference texture which are learned by a one-class classifier. We evaluate our novelty detector in a digital print inspection scenario. The inspection unit is based on a camera array and a flashing light illumination which allows for inline capturing of multichannel images at a high rate. In order to compare our results to manual inspection, we integrated our inspection unit into an industrial single-pass printing system.