We evaluate 179 classifiers arising from 17 families (discriminant analysis, Bayesian, neural networks, support vector machines, decision trees, rule-based classifiers, boosting, bagging, stacking, random forests and other ensembles, generalized linear models, nearest-neighbors, partial least squares and principal component regression, logistic and multinomial regression, multiple adaptive regression splines and other methods), implemented in Weka, R (with and without the caret package), C and Matlab, including all the relevant classifiers available today. We use 121 data sets, which represent the whole UCI data base (excluding the large-scale problems) and other own real problems, in order to achieve significant conclusions about the classifier behavior, not dependent on the data set collection. The classifiers most likely to be the bests are the random forest (RF) versions, the best of which (implemented in R and accessed via caret) achieves 94.1% of the maximum accuracy overcoming 90% in the 84.3% of the data sets. However, the difference is not statistically significant with the second best, the SVM with Gaussian kernel implemented in C using LibSVM, which achieves 92.3% of the maximum accuracy. A few models are clearly better than the remaining ones: random forest, SVM with Gaussian and polynomial kernels, extreme learning machine with Gaussian kernel, C5.0 and avNNet (a committee of multi-layer perceptrons implemented in R with the caret package). The random forest is clearly the best family of classifiers (3 out of 5 bests classifiers are RF), followed by SVM (4 classifiers in the top-10), neural networks and boosting ensembles (5 and 3 members in the top-20, respectively).

/pdf/do-we-need-hundreds-of-classifiers-to-solve-real-world-1igtahh9y9.pdf

Do we need hundreds of classifiers to solve real world classification problems

Three-dimensional models provide a volumetric representation of space which is important for a variety of robotic applications including flying robots and robots that are equipped with manipulators. In this paper, we present an open-source framework to generate volumetric 3D environment models. Our mapping approach is based on octrees and uses probabilistic occupancy estimation. It explicitly represents not only occupied space, but also free and unknown areas. Furthermore, we propose an octree map compression method that keeps the 3D models compact. Our framework is available as an open-source C++ library and has already been successfully applied in several robotics projects. We present a series of experimental results carried out with real robots and on publicly available real-world datasets. The results demonstrate that our approach is able to update the representation efficiently and models the data consistently while keeping the memory requirement at a minimum.

/pdf/octomap-an-efficient-probabilistic-3d-mapping-framework-3dp42nnofi.pdf

OctoMap: an efficient probabilistic 3D mapping framework based on octrees

A morphable model for the synthesis of 3D faces

We explore the effect of dimensionality on the nearest neighbor problem. We show that under a broad set of conditions (much broader than independent and identically distributed dimensions), as dimensionality increases, the distance to the nearest data point approaches the distance to the farthest data point. To provide a practical perspective, we present empirical results on both real and synthetic data sets that demonstrate that this effect can occur for as few as 10-15 dimensions. These results should not be interpreted to mean that high-dimensional indexing is never meaningful; we illustrate this point by identifying some high-dimensional workloads for which this effect does not occur. However, our results do emphasize that the methodology used almost universally in the database literature to evaluate high-dimensional indexing techniques is flawed, and should be modified. In particular, most such techniques proposed in the literature are not evaluated versus simple linear scan, and are evaluated over workloads for which nearest neighbor is not meaningful. Often, even the reported experiments, when analyzed carefully, show that linear scan would outperform the techniques being proposed on the workloads studied in high (10-15) dimensionality!.

When is nearest neighbor meaningful

Three-dimensional models provide a volumetric representation of space which is important for a variety of robotic applications including flying robots and robots that are equipped with manipulators. In this paper, we present an open-source framework to generate volumetric 3D environ- ment models. Our mapping approach is based on octrees and uses probabilistic occupancy estimation. It explicitly repre- sents not only occupied space, but also free and unknown areas. Furthermore, we propose an octree map compression method that keeps the 3D models compact. Our framework is available as an open-source C++ library and has already been successfully applied in several robotics projects. We present a series of experimental results carried out with real robots and on publicly available real-world datasets. The re- sults demonstrate that our approach is able to update the representation efficiently and models the data consistently while keeping the memory requirement at a minimum.

An Efficient Probabilistic 3D Mapping Framework Based on Octrees

In this paper we present an automatic algorithm to detect basic shapes in unorganized point clouds. The algorithm decomposes the point cloud into a concise, hybrid structure of inherent shapes and a set of remaining points. Each detected shape serves as a proxy for a set of corresponding points. Our method is based on random sampling and detects planes, spheres, cylinders, cones and tori. For models with surfaces composed of these basic shapes only, for example, CAD models, we automatically obtain a representation solely consisting of shape proxies. We demonstrate that the algorithm is robust even in the presence of many outliers and a high degree of noise. The proposed method scales well with respect to the size of the input point cloud and the number and size of the shapes within the data. Even point sets with several millions of samples are robustly decomposed within less than a minute. Moreover, the algorithm is conceptually simple and easy to implement. Application areas include measurement of physical parameters, scan registration, surface compression, hybrid rendering, shape classification, meshing, simplification, approximation and reverse engineering.

Efficient RANSAC for Point-Cloud Shape Detection

In this paper we present a progressive compression method for point sampled models that is specifically apt at dealing with densely sampled surface geometry. The compression is lossless and therefore is also suitable for storing the unfiltered, raw scan data. Our method is based on an octree decomposition of space. The point-cloud is encoded in terms of occupied octree-cells. To compress the octree we employ novel prediction techniques that were specifically designed for point sampled geometry and are based on local surface approximations to achieve high compression rates that outperform previous progressive coders for point-sampled geometry. Moreover we demonstrate that additional point attributes, such as color, which are of great importance for point-sampled geometry, can be well integrated and efficiently encoded in this framework.

Octree-based point-cloud compression

We consider the problem of reconstruction from incomplete point-clouds. To find a closed mesh the reconstruction is guided by a set of primitive shapes which has been detected on the input point-cloud (e.g. planes, cylinders etc.). With this guidance we not only continue the surrounding structure into the holes but also synthesize plausible edges and corners from the primitives' intersections. To this end we give a surface energy functional that incorporates the primitive shapes in a guiding vector field. The discretized functional can be minimized with an efficient graph-cut algorithm. A novel greedy optimization strategy is proposed to minimize the functional under the constraint that surface parts corresponding to a given primitive must be connected. From the primitive shapes our method can also reconstruct an idealized model that is suitable for use in a CAD system.

Completion and Reconstruction with Primitive Shapes

Currently, tasks as basic as selecting all windows in a 3d laser scan of a house currently require a disproportional amount of user interaction. We present a flexible framework for the rapid detection of such semantically motivated shapes in large point clouds. Semantic entities are represented as constrained graphs that describe configurations of primitive shapes. Experimental results in various scenarios related to the architectural domain demonstrate the feasibility of the approach.

http://cg.cs.uni-bonn.de/aigaion2root/attachments/cg-2007-1.pdf

Ruwen Schnabel

Papers

Efficient RANSAC for Point-Cloud Shape Detection

Octree-based point-cloud compression

Completion and Reconstruction with Primitive Shapes

Shape Recognition in 3D Point-Clouds

Technical Section: Robust normal estimation for point clouds with sharp features