학술논문

Empty Cities: A Dynamic-Object-Invariant Space for Visual SLAM
Document Type
Periodical
Source
IEEE Transactions on Robotics IEEE Trans. Robot. Robotics, IEEE Transactions on. 37(2):433-451 Apr, 2021
Subject
Robotics and Control Systems
Computing and Processing
Components, Circuits, Devices and Systems
Vehicle dynamics
Simultaneous localization and mapping
Task analysis
Semantics
Dynamics
Deep learning
Gallium nitride
Visual SLAM
Inpainting
Dynamic objects
GANs
Language
ISSN
1552-3098
1941-0468
Abstract
In this article, we present a data-driven approach to obtain the static image of a scene, eliminating dynamic objects that might have been present at the time of traversing the scene with a camera. The general objective is to improve vision-based localization and mapping tasks in dynamic environments, where the presence (or absence) of different dynamic objects in different moments makes these tasks less robust. We introduce an end-to-end deep learning framework to turn images of an urban environment that include dynamic content, such as vehicles or pedestrians, into realistic static frames suitable for localization and mapping. This objective faces two main challenges: detecting the dynamic objects, and inpainting the static occluded background. The first challenge is addressed by the use of a convolutional network that learns a multiclass semantic segmentation of the image. The second challenge is approached with a generative adversarial model that, taking as input the original dynamic image and the computed dynamic/static binary mask, is capable of generating the final static image. This framework makes use of two new losses, one based on image steganalysis techniques, useful to improve the inpainting quality, and another one based on ORB features, designed to enhance feature matching between real and hallucinated image regions. To validate our approach, we perform an extensive evaluation on different tasks that are affected by dynamic entities, i.e.,visual odometry, place recognition, and multiview stereo, with the hallucinated images. Code has been made available on https://github.com/bertabescos/EmptyCities_SLAM.