Today, visual recognition systems are still rarely employed in robotics applications. Perhaps one of the main reasons for this is the lack of demanding benchmarks that mimic such scenarios. In this paper, we take advantage of our autonomous driving platform to develop novel challenging benchmarks for the tasks of stereo, optical flow, visual odometry/SLAM and 3D object detection. Our recording platform is equipped with four high resolution video cameras, a Velodyne laser scanner and a state-of-the-art localization system. Our benchmarks comprise 389 stereo and optical flow image pairs, stereo visual odometry sequences of 39.2 km length, and more than 200k 3D object annotations captured in cluttered scenarios (up to 15 cars and 30 pedestrians are visible per image). Results from state-of-the-art algorithms reveal that methods ranking high on established datasets such as Middlebury perform below average when being moved outside the laboratory to the real world. Our goal is to reduce this bias by providing challenging benchmarks with novel difficulties to the computer vision community. Our benchmarks are available online at: www.cvlibs.net/datasets/kitti

/pdf/are-we-ready-for-autonomous-driving-the-kitti-vision-zygefho352.pdf

Are we ready for autonomous driving? The KITTI vision benchmark suite

Determining optical flow

Let's read! We will often find out this sentence everywhere. When still being a kid, mom used to order us to always read, so did the teacher. Some books are fully read in a week and we need the obligation to support reading. What about now? Do you still love reading? Is reading only for you who have obligation? Absolutely not! We here offer you a new book enPDFd the perception of the visual world to read.

The Perception of the Visual World. By James J. Gibson. U.S.A.: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1950 (George Allen & Unwin, Ltd., London). Price 35s.

Two main results are established in this paper. First, we show that seven point correspondences are sufficient to uniquely determine from two perspective views the three-dimensional motion parameters (within a scale factor for the translations) of a rigid object with curved surfaces. The seven points should not be traversed by two planes with one plane containing the origin, nor by a cone containing the origin. Second, a set of ``essential parameters'' are introduced which uniquely determine the motion parameters up to a scale factor for the translations, and can be estimated by solving a set of linear equations which are derived from the correspondences of eight image points. The actual motion parameters can subsequently be determined by computing the singular value decomposition (SVD) of a 3×3 matrix containing the essential parameters.

/pdf/uniqueness-and-estimation-of-three-dimensional-motion-5lm3gh9y7a.pdf

Uniqueness and Estimation of Three-Dimensional Motion Parameters of Rigid Objects with Curved Surfaces

Optical flow cannot be computed locally, since only one independent measurement is available from the image sequence at a point, while the flow velocity has two components A second constraint is needed A method for finding the optical flow pattern is presented which assumes that the apparent velocity of the brightness pattern varies smoothly almost everywhere in the image An iterative implementation is shown which successfully computes the optical flow for a number of synthetic image sequences The algorithm is robust in that it can handle image sequences that are quantified rather coarsely in space and time It is also insensitive to quantization of brightness levels and additive noise Examples are included where the assumption of smoothness is violated at singular points or along lines in the image

/pdf/determining-optical-flow-3qoeislpjp.pdf

I present here two results from investigations of a computational theory of how the human visual system may obtain information about the physical environment directly from optically sensed velocity fields (optical flow). Previous work has shown how optical flow arises when an observer moves through the static environment. The inverse problem is investigated here: how to recover intrinsic characteristics of the environment from optical flow patterns. The first result is a method for computing the local slant of surfaces relative to the moving observer. The second result is a method for detecting and discriminating among the five types of edges that form the boundaries of surfaces. The results have been formalised as mathematical equations, a physiological model, and a computer program. Properties and predictions resulting from these formal models are discussed with regard to experimental findings in psychophysics.

Perception of surface slant and edge labels from optical flow: a computational approach.

/pdf/joint-optimisation-for-object-class-segmentation-and-dense-j1rwohe233.pdf

Joint Optimisation for Object Class Segmentation and Dense Stereo Reconstruction.

Using conventional robots for metal/inert-gas (MIG) arc welding on thin (1- to 2-mm) sheet steel pressings is restricted by the difficulty of maintaining accurate fit-up and fixturing. Dimensional ...

An Implementation of Model-Based Visual Feedback for Robot Arc Welding of Thin Sheet Steel:

Programming in Prolog (2nd ed.)

We show how the unique character of logic programming can be exploited for the purpose of specifying and automatically reasoning about electrical circuits. Although propositional logic has long been used for describing the truth functions of combinational circuits, the more powerful predicate calculus on which logic programming is based has seen relatively little use in design automation. Previous researchers have introduced a number of techniques similar to logic programming, but many of the useful consequences of the methodology have not been demonstrated. We describe particular consequences of using this method for writing directly executable specifications of circuits, including the use of quantified variables, verification of hypothetical states, and sequential simulation. We have used these methods to solve problems in gate assignment, specialization of standard definitions, and determination of signal flow.

William F. Clocksin

Papers

Perception of surface slant and edge labels from optical flow: a computational approach.

Joint Optimisation for Object Class Segmentation and Dense Stereo Reconstruction.

An Implementation of Model-Based Visual Feedback for Robot Arc Welding of Thin Sheet Steel:

Programming in Prolog (2nd ed.)

Logic programming and digital circuit analysis