S.E.C. Deac, I. Giosan, S. Nedevschi Proceeding of 2019 IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Conference (ITSC), Auckland, New Zeeland, 26-30 October,2019, pp. 3433-3440. In this paper we propose a robust curb detection method which is based on the fusion between semantically labeled camera images and a 3D point cloud coming from LiDAR sensors. The labels from the semantically enhanced cloud are used to reduce the curbs’ searching area. Several spatial cues are next computed on each candidate curb region. Based on these features, a candidate curb region is either rejected or refined for obtaining a precise positioning of the curb points...
V.C. Miclea, S. Nedevschi IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems (Early Access), pp. 1-11, 2019, DOI: 10.1109/TITS.2019.2913883. In this paper, we propose a novel semantic segmentation-based stereo reconstruction method that can keep up with the accuracy of the state-of-the art approaches while running in real time. The solution follows the classic stereo pipeline, each step in the stereo workflow being enhanced by additional information from semantic segmentation. Therefore, we introduce several improvements to computation, aggregation, and optimization by adapting existing techniques to integrate additional surface information given by each semantic class. For the cost computation and optimization steps, we propose...
A. Petrovai, S. Nedevschi Proceeding of 2019 IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium (IV 2019), Paris, France, 9 – 12 June, 2019, pp. 2575-2581. Environment perception for automated vehicles is achieved by fusing the outputs of different sensors such as cameras, LIDARs and RADARs. Images provide a semantic understanding of the environment at object level using instance segmentation, but also at background level using semantic segmentation. We propose a fully convolutional residual network based on Mask R-CNN to achieve both semantic and instance level recognition. We aim at developing an efficient network that could run in real-time for automated driving applications without...
H. Florea, R. Varga, S. Nedevschi Proceedings of 2018 14th IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Computer Communication and Processing (ICCP), Cluj-Napoca, Romania, September 7-9, 2018, pp. 223-228. This paper discusses the architecture of an environment perception system for autonomous vehicles. The modules of the system are described briefly and we focus on important changes in the architecture that enable: decoupling of data acquisition from data processing; synchronous data processing; parallel computation on GPU and multiple CPU cores; efficient data passing using pointers; adaptive architecture capable of working with different number of sensors. The experimental results compare execution times before and...
F. Oniga, S. Nedevschi Proceedings of 2018 14th IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Computer Communication and Processing (ICCP), Cluj-Napoca, Romania, September 7-9, 2018, pp. 209-214. A low complexity approach for computing the orientation of 3D obstacles, detected from lidar data, is proposed in this paper. The proposed method takes as input obstacles represented as cuboids without orientation (aligned with the reference frame). Each cuboid contains a cluster of obstacle locations (discrete grid cells). First, for each obstacle, the boundaries that are visible for the perception system are selected. A model consisting of two perpendicular lines is fitted to the set...
Mathias Bürki, Cesar Cadena, Igor Gilitschenski, Roland Siegwart and Juan Nieto Journal of Fields Robotics (JFR) 2019 Visual localization in outdoor environments is subject to varying appearance conditions rendering it difficult to match current camera images against a previously recorded map. Although it is possible to extend the respective maps to allow precise localization across a wide range of differing appearance conditions, these maps quickly grow in size and become impractical to handle on a mobile robotic platform. To address this problem, we present a landmark selection algorithm that exploits appearance co‐observability for efficient visual localization in outdoor environments. Based...
Lukas Schaupp, Mathias Buerki, Renaud Dube, Roland Siegwart, and Cesar Cadena IEEE/RJS Int. Conference on Intelligent RObots and Systems (IROS) 2019 We introduce a novel method for oriented place recognition with 3D LiDAR scans. A Convolutional Neural Network is trained to extract compact descriptors from single 3D LiDAR scans. These can be used both to retrieve near-by place candidates from a map, and to estimate the yaw discrepancy needed for bootstrapping local registration methods. We employ a triplet loss function for training and use a hard negative mining strategy to further increase the performance of our descriptor extractor. In an...
Mathias Buerki, Lukas Schaupp, Marcyn Dymczyk, Renaud Dube, Cesar Cadena, Roland Siegwart, and Juan Nieto IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium (IV) 2019 Changes in appearance is one of the main sources of failure in visual localization systems in outdoor environments. To address this challenge, we present VIZARD, a visual localization system for urban outdoor environments. By combining a local localization algorithm with the use of multi-session maps, a high localization recall can be achieved across vastly different appearance conditions. The fusion of the visual localization constraints with wheel-odometry in a state estimation framework further guarantees smooth and accurate pose estimates. In...
Julia Nitsch, Juan Nieto, Roland Siegwart, Max Schmidt, and Cesar Cadena IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2019 For autonomous driving applications it is critical to know which type of road users and road side infrastructure are present to plan driving manoeuvres accordingly. Therefore autonomous cars are equipped with different sensor modalities to robustly perceive its environment. However, for classification modules based on machine learning techniques it is challenging to overcome unseen sensor noise. This work presents an object classification module operating on unsupervised learned multi-modal features with the ability to overcome gradual or total sensor failure. A...
Renaud Dube, Andrei Cramariuc1, Daniel Dugas, Hannes Sommer, Marcin Dymczyk, Juan Nieto, Roland Siegwart, and Cesar Cadena International Journal of Robotics Research (IJRR) 2019 Precisely estimating a robot’s pose in a prior, global map is a fundamental capability for mobile robotics, e.g. autonomous driving or exploration in disaster zones. This task, however, remains challenging in unstructured, dynamic environments, where local features are not discriminative enough and global scene descriptors only provide coarse information. We therefore present SegMap: a map representation solution for localization and mapping based on the extraction of segments in 3D point clouds. Working at the level of...
