A Semantic SLAM System for Catadioptric Panoramic Cameras in Dynamic Environments

When a traditional visual SLAM system works in a dynamic environment, it will be disturbed by dynamic objects and perform poorly. In order to overcome the interference of dynamic objects, we propose a semantic SLAM system for catadioptric panoramic cameras in dynamic environments. A real-time instance segmentation network is used to detect potential moving targets in the panoramic image. In order to find the real dynamic targets, potential moving targets are verified according to the sphere’s epipolar constraints. Then, when extracting feature points, the dynamic objects in the panoramic image are masked. Only static feature points are used to estimate the pose of the panoramic camera, so as to improve the accuracy of pose estimation. In order to verify the performance of our system, experiments were conducted on public data sets. The experiments showed that in a highly dynamic environment, the accuracy of our system is significantly better than traditional algorithms. By calculating the RMSE of the absolute trajectory error, we found that our system performed up to 96.3% better than traditional SLAM. Our catadioptric panoramic camera semantic SLAM system has higher accuracy and robustness in complex dynamic environments.

DEVELOPMENT OF PANORAMIC VIRTUAL TOURS SYSTEM BASED ON LOW COST DEVICES

The virtual visit is a simulation of reality that allows virtually changing time or placing. Unlike this, virtual reality offers the possibility to associate the real world with the virtual world, while ensuring interactivity and an improvement in prospecting the reality. One of the most used form of virtual reality is the 360° panoramic imagery and video, currently in the market we can find many providers of panoramic cameras, going from costly professional cameras to the low cost consumer grade cameras. In addition, many software providers offers the virtual tours creation and visualisation, to our knowledge, only google street view offers full mapping functionalities, but the data capture and collection is an opaque operation. Generally, smartphones are equipped with positioning capabilities, based on sensors like gyroscopes, accelerometers, magnetometer used as compass and GPS, the integration of this data allow the estimation of the pose.This paper discusses the creation of an interactive virtual reality with 360° panoramic images with the possibility of automating its acquisition and integration in mapping environment by using smartphone positioning methods, while the panoramic images are taken using costumer grade camera, which composes a low cost system for acquiring and diffusing panoramic virtual tours map. The developed solution is a dynamic web interface using several open source libraries and programming tools.

John R. Connon of Elora, Ontario and his 360-degree panoramic camera

John R. Connon (1862-1931) was a photographer and inventor who lived in Elora, Ontario, Canada during a time of remarkable innovations in the medium of photography. In 1886, Connon began to develop one of the earliest cameras to be capable of a full 360-degree photographic panorama using a single exposure. His early dedication to the use of flexible roll film, introduced by the Eastman Dry Plate and Film Company in 1885, allowed Connon to invent a camera that was ahead of its time. Through an agreement with C. P. Stirn, of C. P. Stirn's Patent Photographic Concealed Vest Cameras, Connon's design was transformed into the Wonder panoramic camera, further inspiring a succession of full-circle panoramic cameras including the Kodak Cirkut cameras. This thesis explores the history of Connon and his invention while acknowledging the history of this little-known Canadian inventor’s important contribution to the history of photographic technology.

John R. Connon of Elora, Ontario and his 360-degree panoramic camera

John R. Connon (1862-1931) was a photographer and inventor who lived in Elora, Ontario, Canada during a time of remarkable innovations in the medium of photography. In 1886, Connon began to develop one of the earliest cameras to be capable of a full 360-degree photographic panorama using a single exposure. His early dedication to the use of flexible roll film, introduced by the Eastman Dry Plate and Film Company in 1885, allowed Connon to invent a camera that was ahead of its time. Through an agreement with C. P. Stirn, of C. P. Stirn's Patent Photographic Concealed Vest Cameras, Connon's design was transformed into the Wonder panoramic camera, further inspiring a succession of full-circle panoramic cameras including the Kodak Cirkut cameras. This thesis explores the history of Connon and his invention while acknowledging the history of this little-known Canadian inventor’s important contribution to the history of photographic technology.

PanoraMIS: An ultra-wide field of view image dataset for vision-based robot-motion estimation

This article presents a new dataset of ultra-wide field of view images with accurate ground truth, called PanoraMIS. The dataset covers a large spectrum of panoramic cameras (catadioptric, twin-fisheye), robotic platforms (wheeled, aerial, and industrial robots), and testing environments (indoors and outdoors), and it is well suited to rigorously validate novel image-based robot-motion estimation algorithms, including visual odometry, visual SLAM, and deep learning-based methods. PanoraMIS and the accompanying documentation is publicly available on the Internet for the entire research community.

Flight Planning for LiDAR-Based UAS Mapping Applications

In the last two decades, unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) were successfully used in different environments for diverse applications like territorial mapping, heritage 3D documentation, as built surveys, construction monitoring, solar panel placement and assessment, road inspections, etc. These applications were correlated to the onboard sensors like RGB cameras, multi-spectral cameras, thermal sensors, panoramic cameras, or LiDARs. According to the different onboard sensors, a different mission plan is required to satisfy the characteristics of the sensor and the project aims. For UAS LiDAR-based mapping missions, requirements for the flight planning are different with respect to conventional UAS image-based flight plans because of different reasons related to the LiDAR scanning mechanism, scanning range, output scanning rate, field of view (FOV), rotation speed, etc. Although flight planning for image-based UAS missions is a well-known and solved problem, flight planning for a LiDAR-based UAS mapping is still an open research topic that needs further investigations. The article presents the developments of a LiDAR-based UAS flight planning tool, tested with simulations in real scenarios. The flight planning simulations considered an UAS platform equipped, alternatively, with three low-cost multi-beam LiDARs, namely Quanergy M8, Velodyne VLP-16, and the Ouster OS-1-16. The specific characteristics of the three sensors were used to plan flights and acquired dense point clouds. Comparisons and analyses of the results showed clear relationships between point density, flying speeds, and flying heights.

Audio and panoramic video recording in the operating room: legal and ethical perspectives

IntroductionThe idea of video recording (VR) in the operating room (OR) with panoramic cameras and microphones is a new concept that is changing the approach to medical activities in the OR. However, VR in the OR has brought up many concerns regarding patient privacy and has highlighted legal and ethical issues that were never previously exposed.AimTo review the literature concerning these aspects and provide a better ethical and legal understanding of the new challenges concerning VR in the OR.ConclusionsThere is a disparity between the two main legal models concerning VR in the OR, namely the European legal system (General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)) and the American legal framework (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)). This difference mainly deals with two distinct bioethical paradigms: GDPR places a strong emphasis on protecting patients’ privacy to improve the public health system, whereas HIPAA indicates the need to generate protocols to safeguard the risks connected to medical activity and patient privacy. Following from this point, we may argue that, at the ethical and bioethical level, GDPR and HIPAA depend mainly on two different ethical models: a perspective based on moral acquaintances and weak proceduralism, respectively. It is worth noting the importance of developing additional guidelines concerning different world regions to avoid the ethical problems that may emerge when simply applying a foreign paradigm to a very different culture.