Anisotropic neighborhood searching for point cloud with sharp feature

The k-nearest neighborhoods (kNN) of feature points of complex surface model are usually isotropic, which may lead to sharp feature blurring during data processing, such as noise removal and surface reconstruction. To address this issue, a new method was proposed to search the anisotropic neighborhood for point cloud with sharp feature. Constructing KD tree and calculating kNN for point cloud data, the principal component analysis method was employed to detect feature points and estimate normal vectors of points. Moreover, improved bilateral normal filter was used to refine the normal vector of feature point to obtain more accurate normal vector. The isotropic kNN of feature point were segmented by mapping the kNN into Gaussian sphere to form different data-clusters, with the hierarchical clustering method used to separate the data in Gaussian sphere into different clusters. The optimal anisotropic neighborhoods of feature point corresponded to the cluster data with the maximum point number. To validate the effectiveness of our method, the anisotropic neighbors are applied to point data processing, such as normal estimation and point cloud denoising. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm in the work is more time-consuming, but provides a more accurate result for point cloud processing by comparing with other kNN searching methods. The anisotropic neighborhood searched by our method can be used to normal estimation, denoising, surface fitting and reconstruction et al. for point cloud with sharp feature, and our method can provide more accurate result comparing with isotropic neighborhood.

Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction in Extremely Crowded Scenarios

Pedestrian trajectory prediction under crowded circumstances is a challenging problem owing to human interaction and the complexity of the trajectory pattern. Various methods have been proposed for solving this problem, ranging from traditional Bayesian analysis to Social Force model and deep learning methods. However, most existing models heavily depend on specific scenarios because the trajectory model is constructed in absolute coordinates even though the motion trajectory as well as human interaction are in relative motion. In this study, a novel trajectory prediction model is proposed to capture the relative motion of pedestrians in extremely crowded scenarios. Trajectory sequences and human interaction are first represented with relative motion and then integrated to our model to predict pedestrians’ trajectories. The proposed model is based on Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) structure and consists of an encoder and a decoder which are trained by truncated back propagation. In addition, an anisotropic neighborhood setting is proposed instead of traditional neighborhood analysis. The proposed approach is validated using trajectory data acquired at an extremely crowded train station in Tokyo, Japan. The trajectory prediction experiments demonstrated that the proposed method outperforms existing methods and is stable for predictions of varying length even when the model is trained with a controlled short trajectory sequence.