No Arabic abstract
Monocular SLAM algorithms perform robustly when observing rigid scenes, however, they fail when the observed scene deforms, for example, in medical endoscopy applications. We present DefSLAM, the first monocular SLAM capable of operating in deforming scenes in real-time. Our approach intertwines Shape-from-Template (SfT) and Non-Rigid Structure-from-Motion (NRSfM) techniques to deal with the exploratory sequences typical of SLAM. A deformation tracking thread recovers the pose of the camera and the deformation of the observed map, at frame rate, by means of SfT processing a template that models the scene shape-at-rest. A deformation mapping thread runs in parallel with the tracking to update the template, at keyframe rate, by means of an isometric NRSfM processing a batch of full perspective keyframes. In our experiments, DefSLAM processes close-up sequences of deforming scenes, both in a laboratory controlled experiment and in medical endoscopy sequences, producing accurate 3D models of the scene with respect to the moving camera.
Conventional SLAM techniques strongly rely on scene rigidity to solve data association, ignoring dynamic parts of the scene. In this work we present Semi-Direct DefSLAM (SD-DefSLAM), a novel monocular deformable SLAM method able to map highly deforming environments, built on top of DefSLAM. To robustly solve data association in challenging deforming scenes, SD-DefSLAM combines direct and indirect methods: an enhanced illumination-invariant Lucas-Kanade tracker for data association, geometric Bundle Adjustment for pose and deformable map estimation, and bag-of-words based on feature descriptors for camera relocation. Dynamic objects are detected and segmented-out using a CNN trained for the specific application domain. We thoroughly evaluate our system in two public datasets. The mandala dataset is a SLAM benchmark with increasingly aggressive deformations. The Hamlyn dataset contains intracorporeal sequences that pose serious real-life challenges beyond deformation like weak texture, specular reflections, surgical tools and occlusions. Our results show that SD-DefSLAM outperforms DefSLAM in point tracking, reconstruction accuracy and scale drift thanks to the improvement in all the data association steps, being the first system able to robustly perform SLAM inside the human body.
Monocular depth reconstruction of complex and dynamic scenes is a highly challenging problem. While for rigid scenes learning-based methods have been offering promising results even in unsupervised cases, there exists little to no literature addressing the same for dynamic and deformable scenes. In this work, we present an unsupervised monocular framework for dense depth estimation of dynamic scenes, which jointly reconstructs rigid and non-rigid parts without explicitly modelling the camera motion. Using dense correspondences, we derive a training objective that aims to opportunistically preserve pairwise distances between reconstructed 3D points. In this process, the dense depth map is learned implicitly using the as-rigid-as-possible hypothesis. Our method provides promising results, demonstrating its capability of reconstructing 3D from challenging videos of non-rigid scenes. Furthermore, the proposed method also provides unsupervised motion segmentation results as an auxiliary output.
We propose an efficient method for non-rigid surface tracking from monocular RGB videos. Given a video and a template mesh, our algorithm sequentially registers the template non-rigidly to each frame. We formulate the per-frame registration as an optimization problem that includes a novel texture term specifically tailored towards tracking objects with uniform texture but fine-scale structure, such as the regular micro-structural patterns of fabric. Our texture term exploits the orientation information in the micro-structures of the objects, e.g., the yarn patterns of fabrics. This enables us to accurately track uniformly colored materials that have these high frequency micro-structures, for which traditional photometric terms are usually less effective. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on both general textured non-rigid objects and monochromatic fabrics.
Semantic aware reconstruction is more advantageous than geometric-only reconstruction for future robotic and AR/VR applications because it represents not only where things are, but also what things are. Object-centric mapping is a task to build an object-level reconstruction where objects are separate and meaningful entities that convey both geometry and semantic information. In this paper, we present MOLTR, a solution to object-centric mapping using only monocular image sequences and camera poses. It is able to localise, track, and reconstruct multiple objects in an online fashion when an RGB camera captures a video of the surrounding. Given a new RGB frame, MOLTR firstly applies a monocular 3D detector to localise objects of interest and extract their shape codes that represent the object shapes in a learned embedding space. Detections are then merged to existing objects in the map after data association. Motion state (i.e. kinematics and the motion status) of each object is tracked by a multiple model Bayesian filter and object shape is progressively refined by fusing multiple shape code. We evaluate localisation, tracking, and reconstruction on benchmarking datasets for indoor and outdoor scenes, and show superior performance over previous approaches.
An objects interior material properties, while invisible to the human eye, determine motion observed on its surface. We propose an approach that estimates heterogeneous material properties of an object directly from a monocular video of its surface vibrations. Specifically, we estimate Youngs modulus and density throughout a 3D object with known geometry. Knowledge of how these values change across the object is useful for characterizing defects and simulating how the object will interact with different environments. Traditional non-destructive testing approaches, which generally estimate homogenized material properties or the presence of defects, are expensive and use specialized instruments. We propose an approach that leverages monocular video to (1) measure and objects sub-pixel motion and decompose this motion into image-space modes, and (2) directly infer spatially-varying Youngs modulus and density values from the observed image-space modes. On both simulated and real videos, we demonstrate that our approach is able to image material properties simply by analyzing surface motion. In particular, our method allows us to identify unseen defects on a 2D drum head from real, high-speed video.