Central to the looming paradigm shift toward data-intensive science, machine-learning techniques are becoming increasingly important. In particular, deep learning has proven to be both a major breakthrough and an extremely powerful tool in many fields. Shall we embrace deep learning as the key to everything? Or should we resist a black-box solution? These are controversial issues within the remote-sensing community. In this article, we analyze the challenges of using deep learning for remote-sensing data analysis, review recent advances, and provide resources we hope will make deep learning in remote sensing seem ridiculously simple. More importantly, we encourage remote-sensing scientists to bring their expertise into deep learning and use it as an implicit general model to tackle unprecedented, large-scale, influential challenges, such as climate change and urbanization.

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Deep Learning in Remote Sensing: A Comprehensive Review and List of Resources

Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) consists in the concurrent construction of a model of the environment (the map ), and the estimation of the state of the robot moving within it. The SLAM community has made astonishing progress over the last 30 years, enabling large-scale real-world applications and witnessing a steady transition of this technology to industry. We survey the current state of SLAM and consider future directions. We start by presenting what is now the de-facto standard formulation for SLAM. We then review related work, covering a broad set of topics including robustness and scalability in long-term mapping, metric and semantic representations for mapping, theoretical performance guarantees, active SLAM and exploration, and other new frontiers. This paper simultaneously serves as a position paper and tutorial to those who are users of SLAM. By looking at the published research with a critical eye, we delineate open challenges and new research issues, that still deserve careful scientific investigation. The paper also contains the authors’ take on two questions that often animate discussions during robotics conferences: Do robots need SLAM? and Is SLAM solved?

/pdf/past-present-and-future-of-simultaneous-localization-and-27i1pn9khc.pdf

Past, Present, and Future of Simultaneous Localization and Mapping: Toward the Robust-Perception Age

Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM)consists in the concurrent construction of a model of the environment (the map), and the estimation of the state of the robot moving within it. The SLAM community has made astonishing progress over the last 30 years, enabling large-scale real-world applications, and witnessing a steady transition of this technology to industry. We survey the current state of SLAM. We start by presenting what is now the de-facto standard formulation for SLAM. We then review related work, covering a broad set of topics including robustness and scalability in long-term mapping, metric and semantic representations for mapping, theoretical performance guarantees, active SLAM and exploration, and other new frontiers. This paper simultaneously serves as a position paper and tutorial to those who are users of SLAM. By looking at the published research with a critical eye, we delineate open challenges and new research issues, that still deserve careful scientific investigation. The paper also contains the authors' take on two questions that often animate discussions during robotics conferences: Do robots need SLAM? and Is SLAM solved?

/pdf/past-present-and-future-of-simultaneous-localization-and-dhljw0akg5.pdf

Past, Present, and Future of Simultaneous Localization And Mapping: Towards the Robust-Perception Age

This work presents a Multi-View Stereo system for robust and efficient dense modeling from unstructured image collections. Our core contributions are the joint estimation of depth and normal information, pixelwise view selection using photometric and geometric priors, and a multi-view geometric consistency term for the simultaneous refinement and image-based depth and normal fusion. Experiments on benchmarks and large-scale Internet photo collections demonstrate state-of-the-art performance in terms of accuracy, completeness, and efficiency.

/pdf/pixelwise-view-selection-for-unstructured-multi-view-stereo-ue2no30piv.pdf

Pixelwise View Selection for Unstructured Multi-View Stereo

This paper focuses on semantic scene completion, a task for producing a complete 3D voxel representation of volumetric occupancy and semantic labels for a scene from a single-view depth map observation. Previous work has considered scene completion and semantic labeling of depth maps separately. However, we observe that these two problems are tightly intertwined. To leverage the coupled nature of these two tasks, we introduce the semantic scene completion network (SSCNet), an end-to-end 3D convolutional network that takes a single depth image as input and simultaneously outputs occupancy and semantic labels for all voxels in the camera view frustum. Our network uses a dilation-based 3D context module to efficiently expand the receptive field and enable 3D context learning. To train our network, we construct SUNCG - a manually created largescale dataset of synthetic 3D scenes with dense volumetric annotations. Our experiments demonstrate that the joint model outperforms methods addressing each task in isolation and outperforms alternative approaches on the semantic scene completion task. The dataset and code is available at http://sscnet.cs.princeton.edu.

https://openaccess.thecvf.com/content_cvpr_2017/papers/Song_Semantic_Scene_Completion_CVPR_2017_paper.pdf

Semantic Scene Completion from a Single Depth Image

Both image segmentation and dense 3D modeling from images represent an intrinsically ill-posed problem. Strong regularizers are therefore required to constrain the solutions from being 'too noisy'. Unfortunately, these priors generally yield overly smooth reconstructions and/or segmentations in certain regions whereas they fail in other areas to constrain the solution sufficiently. In this paper we argue that image segmentation and dense 3D reconstruction contribute valuable information to each other's task. As a consequence, we propose a rigorous mathematical framework to formulate and solve a joint segmentation and dense reconstruction problem. Image segmentations provide geometric cues about which surface orientations are more likely to appear at a certain location in space whereas a dense 3D reconstruction yields a suitable regularization for the segmentation problem by lifting the labeling from 2D images to 3D space. We show how appearance-based cues and 3D surface orientation priors can be learned from training data and subsequently used for class-specific regularization. Experimental results on several real data sets highlight the advantages of our joint formulation.

/pdf/joint-3d-scene-reconstruction-and-class-segmentation-53qw0ew60c.pdf

Joint 3D Scene Reconstruction and Class Segmentation

Many architectural scenes contain symmetric or repeated structures, which can generate erroneous image correspondences during structure from motion (Sfm) computation. Prior work has shown that the detection and removal of these incorrect matches is crucial for accurate and robust recovery of scene structure. In this paper, we point out that these incorrect matches, in fact, provide strong cues to the existence of symmetries and structural regularities in the unknown 3D structure. We make two key contributions. First, we propose a method to recover various symmetry relations in the structure using geometric and appearance cues. A set of structural constraints derived from the symmetries are imposed within a new constrained bundle adjustment formulation, where symmetry priors are also incorporated. Second, we show that the recovered symmetries enable us to choose a natural coordinate system for the 3D structure where gauge freedom in rotation is held fixed. Furthermore, based on the symmetries, 3D structure completion is also performed. Our approach significantly reduces drift through ”structural” loop closures and improves the accuracy of reconstructions in urban scenes.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/CohenCVPR12.pdf

Discovering and exploiting 3D symmetries in structure from motion

Both image segmentation and dense 3D modeling from images represent an intrinsically ill-posed problem. Strong regularizers are therefore required to constrain the solutions from being ‘too noisy’. These priors generally yield overly smooth reconstructions and/or segmentations in certain regions while they fail to constrain the solution sufficiently in other areas. In this paper, we argue that image segmentation and dense 3D reconstruction contribute valuable information to each other’s task. As a consequence, we propose a mathematical framework to formulate and solve a joint segmentation and dense reconstruction problem. On the one hand knowing about the semantic class of the geometry provides information about the likelihood of the surface direction. On the other hand the surface direction provides information about the likelihood of the semantic class. Experimental results on several data sets highlight the advantages of our joint formulation. We show how weakly observed surfaces are reconstructed more faithfully compared to a geometry only reconstruction. Thanks to the volumetric nature of our formulation we also infer surfaces which cannot be directly observed for example the surface between the ground and a building. Finally, our method returns a semantic segmentation which is consistent across the whole dataset.

Dense Semantic 3D Reconstruction

We propose a sequential optimization technique for segmenting a rectified image of a facade into semantic categories. Our method retrieves a parsing which respects common architectural constraints and also returns a certificate for global optimality. Contrasting the suggested method, the considered facade labeling problem is typically tackled as a classification task or as grammar parsing. Both approaches are not capable of fully exploiting the regularity of the problem. Therefore, our technique very significantly improves the accuracy compared to the state-of-the-art while being an order of magnitude faster. In addition, in 85% of the test images we obtain a certificate for optimality.

/pdf/efficient-structured-parsing-of-facades-using-dynamic-gjythm81bj.pdf

Efficient Structured Parsing of Facades Using Dynamic Programming

We propose a novel prior for variational 3D reconstruction that favors symmetric solutions when dealing with noisy or incomplete data. We detect symmetries from incomplete data while explicitly handling unexplored areas to allow for plausible scene completions. The set of detected symmetries is then enforced on their respective support domain within a variational reconstruction framework. This formulation also handles multiple symmetries sharing the same support. The proposed approach is able to denoise and complete surface geometry and even hallucinate large scene parts. We demonstrate in several experiments the benefit of harnessing symmetries when regularizing a surface.

/pdf/a-symmetry-prior-for-convex-variational-3d-reconstruction-387gkks2gn.pdf

Andrea Cohen

Papers

Joint 3D Scene Reconstruction and Class Segmentation

Discovering and exploiting 3D symmetries in structure from motion

Dense Semantic 3D Reconstruction

Efficient Structured Parsing of Facades Using Dynamic Programming

A Symmetry Prior for Convex Variational 3D Reconstruction