This paper presents Direct LiDAR-Inertial Odometry and Mapping (DLIOM), a robust SLAM algorithm with an explicit focus on computational efficiency, operational reliability, and real-world efficacy. DLIOM contains several key algorithmic innovations in both the front-end and back-end subsystems to design a resilient LiDAR-inertial architecture that is perceptive to the environment and produces accurate localization and high-fidelity 3D mapping for autonomous robotic platforms. Our ideas spawned after a deep investigation into modern LiDAR SLAM systems and their inabilities to generalize across different operating environments, in which we address several common algorithmic failure points by means of proactive safe-guards to provide long-term operational reliability in the unstructured real world. We detail several important innovations to localization accuracy and mapping resiliency distributed throughout a typical LiDAR SLAM pipeline to comprehensively increase algorithmic speed, accuracy, and robustness. In addition, we discuss insights gained from our ground-up approach while implementing such a complex system for real-time state estimation on resource-constrained systems, and we experimentally show the increased performance of our method as compared to the current state-of-the-art on both public benchmark and self-collected datasets.
Data-driven approaches recently achieved remarkable success in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) reconstruction, but integration into clinical routine remains challenging due to a lack of generalizability and interpretability. In this paper, we address these challenges in a unified framework based on generative image priors. We propose a novel deep neural network based regularizer which is trained in a generative setting on reference magnitude images only. After training, the regularizer encodes higher-level domain statistics which we demonstrate by synthesizing images without data. Embedding the trained model in a classical variational approach yields high-quality reconstructions irrespective of the sub-sampling pattern. In addition, the model shows stable behavior when confronted with out-of-distribution data in the form of contrast variation. Furthermore, a probabilistic interpretation provides a distribution of reconstructions and hence allows uncertainty quantification. To reconstruct parallel MRI, we propose a fast algorithm to jointly estimate the image and the sensitivity maps. The results demonstrate competitive performance, on par with state-of-the-art end-to-end deep learning methods, while preserving the flexibility with respect to sub-sampling patterns and allowing for uncertainty quantification.
Robustly and accurately localizing objects in real-world environments can be challenging due to noisy data, hardware limitations, and the inherent randomness of physical systems. To account for these factors, existing works estimate the aleatoric uncertainty of object detectors by modeling their localization output as a Gaussian distribution $\mathcal{N}(\mu,\,\sigma^{2})\,$, and training with loss attenuation. We identify three aspects that are unaddressed in the state of the art, but warrant further exploration: (1) the efficient and mathematically sound propagation of $\mathcal{N}(\mu,\,\sigma^{2})\,$ through non-linear post-processing, (2) the calibration of the predicted uncertainty, and (3) its interpretation. We overcome these limitations by: (1) implementing loss attenuation in EfficientDet, and proposing two deterministic methods for the exact and fast propagation of the output distribution, (2) demonstrating on the KITTI and BDD100K datasets that the predicted uncertainty is miscalibrated, and adapting two calibration methods to the localization task, and (3) investigating the correlation between aleatoric uncertainty and task-relevant error sources. Our contributions are: (1) up to five times faster propagation while increasing localization performance by up to 1\%, (2) up to fifteen times smaller expected calibration error, and (3) the predicted uncertainty is found to correlate with occlusion, object distance, detection accuracy, and image quality.
Event extraction (EE) is a crucial task aiming at extracting events from texts, which includes two subtasks: event detection (ED) and event argument extraction (EAE). In this paper, we check the reliability of EE evaluations and identify three major pitfalls: (1) The data preprocessing discrepancy makes the evaluation results on the same dataset not directly comparable, but the data preprocessing details are not widely noted and specified in papers. (2) The output space discrepancy of different model paradigms makes different-paradigm EE models lack grounds for comparison and also leads to unclear mapping issues between predictions and annotations. (3) The absence of pipeline evaluation of many EAE-only works makes them hard to be directly compared with EE works and may not well reflect the model performance in real-world pipeline scenarios. We demonstrate the significant influence of these pitfalls through comprehensive meta-analyses of recent papers and empirical experiments. To avoid these pitfalls, we suggest a series of remedies, including specifying data preprocessing, standardizing outputs, and providing pipeline evaluation results. To help implement these remedies, we develop a consistent evaluation framework OMNIEVENT, which can be obtained from //github.com/THU-KEG/OmniEvent.
In this paper, we present BAMF-SLAM, a novel multi-fisheye visual-inertial SLAM system that utilizes Bundle Adjustment (BA) and recurrent field transforms (RFT) to achieve accurate and robust state estimation in challenging scenarios. First, our system directly operates on raw fisheye images, enabling us to fully exploit the wide Field-of-View (FoV) of fisheye cameras. Second, to overcome the low-texture challenge, we explore the tightly-coupled integration of multi-camera inputs and complementary inertial measurements via a unified factor graph and jointly optimize the poses and dense depth maps. Third, for global consistency, the wide FoV of the fisheye camera allows the system to find more potential loop closures, and powered by the broad convergence basin of RFT, our system can perform very wide baseline loop closing with little overlap. Furthermore, we introduce a semi-pose-graph BA method to avoid the expensive full global BA. By combining relative pose factors with loop closure factors, the global states can be adjusted efficiently with modest memory footprint while maintaining high accuracy. Evaluations on TUM-VI, Hilti-Oxford and Newer College datasets show the superior performance of the proposed system over prior works. In the Hilti SLAM Challenge 2022, our VIO version achieves second place. In a subsequent submission, our complete system, including the global BA backend, outperforms the winning approach.
We present a real-time visual-inertial dense mapping method capable of performing incremental 3D mesh reconstruction with high quality using only sequential monocular images and inertial measurement unit (IMU) readings. 6-DoF camera poses are estimated by a robust feature-based visual-inertial odometry (VIO), which also generates noisy sparse 3D map points as a by-product. We propose a sparse point aided multi-view stereo neural network (SPA-MVSNet) that can effectively leverage the informative but noisy sparse points from the VIO system. The sparse depth from VIO is firstly completed by a single-view depth completion network. This dense depth map, although naturally limited in accuracy, is then used as a prior to guide our MVS network in the cost volume generation and regularization for accurate dense depth prediction. Predicted depth maps of keyframe images by the MVS network are incrementally fused into a global map using TSDF-Fusion. We extensively evaluate both the proposed SPA-MVSNet and the entire visual-inertial dense mapping system on several public datasets as well as our own dataset, demonstrating the system's impressive generalization capabilities and its ability to deliver high-quality 3D mesh reconstruction online. Our proposed dense mapping system achieves a 39.7% improvement in F-score over existing systems when evaluated on the challenging scenarios of the EuRoC dataset. We plan to release the code of this work upon acceptance.
Robustness in Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) remains one of the key challenges for the real-world deployment of autonomous systems. SLAM research has seen significant progress in the last two and a half decades, yet many state-of-the-art (SOTA) algorithms still struggle to perform reliably in real-world environments. There is a general consensus in the research community that we need challenging real-world scenarios which bring out different failure modes in sensing modalities. In this paper, we present a novel multi-modal indoor SLAM dataset covering challenging common scenarios that a robot will encounter and should be robust to. Our data was collected with a mobile robotics platform across multiple floors at Northeastern University's ISEC building. Such a multi-floor sequence is typical of commercial office spaces characterized by symmetry across floors and, thus, is prone to perceptual aliasing due to similar floor layouts. The sensor suite comprises seven global shutter cameras, a high-grade MEMS inertial measurement unit (IMU), a ZED stereo camera, and a 128-channel high-resolution lidar. Along with the dataset, we benchmark several SLAM algorithms and highlight the problems faced during the runs, such as perceptual aliasing, visual degradation, and trajectory drift. The benchmarking results indicate that parts of the dataset work well with some algorithms, while other data sections are challenging for even the best SOTA algorithms. The dataset is available at //github.com/neufieldrobotics/NUFR-M3F.
Monocular visual-inertial odometry (VIO) is a low-cost solution to provide high-accuracy, low-drifting pose estimation. However, it has been meeting challenges in vehicular scenarios due to limited dynamics and lack of stable features. In this paper, we propose Ground-VIO, which utilizes ground features and the specific camera-ground geometry to enhance monocular VIO performance in realistic road environments. In the method, the camera-ground geometry is modeled with vehicle-centered parameters and integrated into an optimization-based VIO framework. These parameters could be calibrated online and simultaneously improve the odometry accuracy by providing stable scale-awareness. Besides, a specially designed visual front-end is developed to stably extract and track ground features via the inverse perspective mapping (IPM) technique. Both simulation tests and real-world experiments are conducted to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method. The results show that our implementation could dramatically improve monocular VIO accuracy in vehicular scenarios, achieving comparable or even better performance than state-of-art stereo VIO solutions. The system could also be used for the auto-calibration of IPM which is widely used in vehicle perception. A toolkit for ground feature processing, together with the experimental datasets, would be made open-source (//github.com/GREAT_WHU/gv_tools).
In this work, we present a novel target-based lidar-camera extrinsic calibration methodology that can be used for non-overlapping field of view (FOV) sensors. Contrary to previous work, our methodology overcomes the non-overlapping FOV challenge using a motion capture system (MCS) instead of traditional simultaneous localization and mapping approaches. Due to the high relative precision of the MCS, our methodology can achieve both the high accuracy and repeatable calibrations of traditional target-based methods, regardless of the amount of overlap in the field of view of the sensors. We show using simulation that we can accurately recover extrinsic calibrations for a range of perturbations to the true calibration that would be expected in real circumstances. We also validate that high accuracy calibrations can be achieved on experimental data. Furthermore, We implement the described approach in an extensible way that allows any camera model, target shape, or feature extraction methodology to be used within our framework. We validate this implementation on two target shapes: an easy to construct cylinder target and a diamond target with a checkerboard. The cylinder target shape results show that our methodology can be used for degenerate target shapes where target poses cannot be fully constrained from a single observation, and distinct repeatable features need not be detected on the target.
Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) stands as one of the critical challenges in robot navigation. Recent advancements suggest that methods based on supervised learning deliver impressive performance in front-end odometry, while traditional optimization-based methods still play a vital role in the back-end for minimizing estimation drift. In this paper, we found that such decoupled paradigm can lead to only sub-optimal performance, consequently curtailing system capabilities and generalization potential. To solve this problem, we proposed a novel self-supervised learning framework, imperative SLAM (iSLAM), which fosters reciprocal correction between the front-end and back-end, thus enhancing performance without necessitating any external supervision. Specifically, we formulate a SLAM system as a bi-level optimization problem so that the two components are bidirectionally connected. As a result, the front-end model is able to learn global geometric knowledge obtained through pose graph optimization by back-propagating the residuals from the back-end. This significantly improves the generalization ability of the entire system and thus achieves the accuracy improvement up to 45%. To the best of our knowledge, iSLAM is the first SLAM system showing that the front-end and back-end can learn jointly and mutually contribute to each other in a self-supervised manner.
We present a monocular Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) using high level object and plane landmarks, in addition to points. The resulting map is denser, more compact and meaningful compared to point only SLAM. We first propose a high order graphical model to jointly infer the 3D object and layout planes from single image considering occlusions and semantic constraints. The extracted cuboid object and layout planes are further optimized in a unified SLAM framework. Objects and planes can provide more semantic constraints such as Manhattan and object supporting relationships compared to points. Experiments on various public and collected datasets including ICL NUIM and TUM mono show that our algorithm can improve camera localization accuracy compared to state-of-the-art SLAM and also generate dense maps in many structured environments.