3D Reconstruction with circular light field by using 3D hough transformation

Aiming at the issue of incomplete trajectories in the 2D epipolar image of circular light field, this paper proposes a 3D reconstruction method by using 3D Hough transformation. This method computes 3D point clouds by computing the parameters of feature trajectories in 3D image volume. By analyzing the 3D distribution of circular light field trajectories, binary curves in image volume are extracted, and their local orientation are further estimated by the 3D structure tensor. The 3D Hough space generation and the parameter selection method are proposed to the 3D curves detection. The parameters of these curves are converted to 3D point clouds on each view and then merged to final 3D reconstruction. The ambiguity of Hough transformation solution on 2D epipolar image is overcome by the 3D analyzing method. The experiments are carried out on both synthetic and real datasets. The experiment results show that this method can improve the reconstruction performance compared with the state-of-the-art in circular light field.

A Hough-Space-Based Automatic Online Calibration Method for a Side-Rear-View Monitoring System

We propose an automatic camera calibration method for a side-rear-view monitoring system in natural driving environments. The proposed method assumes that the camera is always located near the surface of the vehicle so that it always shoots a part of the vehicle. This method utilizes photographed vehicle information because the captured vehicle always appears stationary in the image, regardless of the surrounding environment. The proposed algorithm detects the vehicle from the image and computes the similarity score between the detected vehicle and the previously stored vehicle model. Conventional online calibration methods use additional equipment or operate only in specific driving environments. On the contrary, the proposed method is advantageous because it can automatically calibrate camera-based monitoring systems in any driving environment without using additional equipment. The calibration range of the automatic calibration method was verified through simulations and evaluated both quantitatively and qualitatively through actual driving experiments.

Fast Planar Detection System Using a GPU-Based 3D Hough Transform for LiDAR Point Clouds

Plane extraction is regarded as a necessary function that supports judgment basis in many applications, including semantic digital map reconstruction and path planning for unmanned ground vehicles. Owing to the heterogeneous density and unstructured spatial distribution of three-dimensional (3D) point clouds collected by light detection and ranging (LiDAR), plane extraction from it is recently a significant challenge. This paper proposed a parallel 3D Hough transform algorithm to realize rapid and precise plane detection from 3D LiDAR point clouds. After transforming all the 3D points from a Cartesian coordinate system to a pre-defined 3D Hough space, the generated Hough space is rasterised into a series of arranged cells to store the resided point counts into individual cells. A 3D connected component labeling algorithm is developed to cluster the cells with high values in Hough space into several clusters. The peaks from these clusters are extracted so that the targeting planar surfaces are obtained in polar coordinates. Because the laser beams emitted by LiDAR sensor holds several fixed angles, the collected 3D point clouds distribute as several horizontal and parallel circles in plane surfaces. This kind of horizontal and parallel circles mislead plane detecting results from horizontal wall surfaces to parallel planes. For detecting accurate plane parameters, this paper adopts a fraction-to-fraction method to gradually transform raw point clouds into a series of sub Hough space buffers. In our proposed planar detection algorithm, a graphic processing unit (GPU) programming technology is applied to speed up the calculation of 3D Hough space updating and peaks searching.

Multi-Stage Hough Space Calculation for Lane Markings Detection via IMU and Vision Fusion

It is challenging to achieve robust lane detection based on a single frame, particularly when complicated driving scenarios are present. A novel approach based on multiple frames is proposed in this paper by taking advantage of the fusion of vision and Inertial Measurement Units (IMU). Hough space is employed as a storage medium where lane markings can be stored and visited conveniently. The detection of lane markings is achieved by the following steps. Firstly, primary line segments are extracted from a basic Hough space, which is calculated by Hough Transform. Secondly, a CNN-based classifier is introduced to measure the confidence probability of each line segment, and transforms the basic Hough space into a probabilistic Hough space. In the third step, pose information provided by the IMU is applied to align previous probabilistic Hough spaces to the current one and a filtered probabilistic Hough space is acquired by smoothing the primary probabilistic Hough space across frames. Finally, valid line segments with probability higher than 0.7 are extracted from the filtered probabilistic Hough space. The proposed approach is applied experimentally, and the results demonstrate a satisfying performance compared to various existing methods.

Multi-Stage Hough Space Calculation for Lane Mark Detection via IMU and Vision Data Fusion

It's challenging to achieve robust lane detection depending on single frame when considering complicated scenarios. In order to detect more credible lane markings by using sequential frames, a novel approach to fusing vision and Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) is proposed in this paper. The hough space is employed as the space where lane markings are stored and it's calculated by three steps. Firstly, a basic hough space is extracted by Hough Transform and primary line segments are extracted from it. In order to measure the possibility about line segments belong to lane markings, a CNNs based classifier is introduced to transform the basic hough space into a probabilistic space by using the networks outputs. However, this probabilistic hough space based on single frame is easily disturbed. In the third step, a filtering process is employed to smooth the probabilistic hough space by using sequential information. Pose information provided by IMU is applied to align hough spaces extracted at different times to each other. The final hough space is used to eliminate line segments with low possibility and output those with high confidence as the result. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed approach has achieved a good performance.