EdgeVO: An Efficient and Accurate Edge-based Visual Odometry

Visual odometry is important for plenty of applications such as autonomous vehicles, and robot navigation. It is challenging to conduct visual odometry in textureless scenes or environments with sudden illumination changes where popular feature-based methods or direct methods cannot work well. To address this challenge, some edge-based methods have been proposed, but they usually struggle between the efficiency and accuracy. In this work, we propose a novel visual odometry approach called \textit{EdgeVO}, which is accurate, efficient, and robust. By efficiently selecting a small set of edges with certain strategies, we significantly improve the computational efficiency without sacrificing the accuracy. Compared to existing edge-based method, our method can significantly reduce the computational complexity while maintaining similar accuracy or even achieving better accuracy. This is attributed to that our method removes useless or noisy edges. Experimental results on the TUM datasets indicate that EdgeVO significantly outperforms other methods in terms of efficiency, accuracy and robustness.

Location reference recognition from texts: A survey and comparison

A vast amount of location information exists in unstructured texts, such as social media posts, news stories, scientific articles, web pages, travel blogs, and historical archives. Geoparsing refers to the process of recognizing location references from texts and identifying their geospatial representations. While geoparsing can benefit many domains, a summary of the specific applications is still missing. Further, there lacks a comprehensive review and comparison of existing approaches for location reference recognition, which is the first and a core step of geoparsing. To fill these research gaps, this review first summarizes seven typical application domains of geoparsing: geographic information retrieval, disaster management, disease surveillance, traffic management, spatial humanities, tourism management, and crime management. We then review existing approaches for location reference recognition by categorizing these approaches into four groups based on their underlying functional principle: rule-based, gazetteer matching-based, statistical learning-based, and hybrid approaches. Next, we thoroughly evaluate the correctness and computational efficiency of the 27 most widely used approaches for location reference recognition based on 26 public datasets with different types of texts (e.g., social media posts and news stories) containing 39,736 location references across the world. Results from this thorough evaluation can help inform future methodological developments for location reference recognition, and can help guide the selection of proper approaches based on application needs.

Surrogate-based cross-correlation for particle image velocimetry

This paper presents a novel surrogate-based cross-correlation (SBCC) framework to improve the correlation performance between two image signals. The basic idea behind the SBCC is that an optimized surrogate filter/image, supplanting one original image, will produce a more robust and more accurate correlation signal. The cross-correlation estimation of the SBCC is formularized with an objective function composed of surrogate loss and correlation consistency loss. The closed-form solution provides an efficient estimation. To our surprise, the SBCC framework could provide an alternative view to explain a set of generalized cross-correlation (GCC) methods and comprehend the meaning of parameters. With the help of our SBCC framework, we further propose four new specific cross-correlation methods, and provide some suggestions for improving existing GCC methods. A noticeable fact is that the SBCC could enhance the correlation robustness by incorporating other negative context images. Considering the sub-pixel accuracy and robustness requirement of particle image velocimetry (PIV), the contribution of each term in the objective function is investigated with particles' images. Compared with the state-of-the-art baseline methods, the SBCC methods exhibit improved performance (accuracy and robustness) on the synthetic dataset and several challenging real experimental PIV cases.

EventDrop: data augmentation for event-based learning

The advantages of event-sensing over conventional sensors (e.g., higher dynamic range, lower time latency, and lower power consumption) have spurred research into machine learning for event data. Unsurprisingly, deep learning has emerged as a competitive methodology for learning with event sensors; in typical setups, discrete and asynchronous events are first converted into frame-like tensors on which standard deep networks can be applied. However, over-fitting remains a challenge, particularly since event datasets remain small relative to conventional datasets (e.g., ImageNet). In this paper, we introduce EventDrop, a new method for augmenting asynchronous event data to improve the generalization of deep models. By dropping events selected with various strategies, we are able to increase the diversity of training data (e.g., to simulate various levels of occlusion). From a practical perspective, EventDrop is simple to implement and computationally low-cost. Experiments on two event datasets (N-Caltech101 and N-Cars) demonstrate that EventDrop can significantly improve the generalization performance across a variety of deep networks.

Fast and Reliable WiFi Fingerprint Collection for Indoor Localization

Fingerprinting is a popular indoor localization technique since it can utilize existing infrastructures (e.g., access points). However, its site survey process is a labor-intensive and time-consuming task, which limits the application of such systems in practice. In this paper, motivated by the availability of advanced sensing capabilities in smartphones, we propose a fast and reliable fingerprint collection method to reduce the time and labor required for site survey. The proposed method uses a landmark graph-based method to automatically associate the collected fingerprints, which does not require active user participation. We will show that besides fast fingerprint data collection, the proposed method results in accurate location estimate compared to the state-of-the-art methods. Experimental results show that the proposed method is an order of magnitude faster than the manual fingerprint collection method, and using the radio map generated by our method achieves a much better accuracy compared to the existing methods.

TactileSGNet: A Spiking Graph Neural Network for Event-based Tactile Object Recognition

Tactile perception is crucial for a variety of robot tasks including grasping and in-hand manipulation. New advances in flexible, event-driven, electronic skins may soon endow robots with touch perception capabilities similar to humans. These electronic skins respond asynchronously to changes (e.g., in pressure, temperature), and can be laid out irregularly on the robot's body or end-effector. However, these unique features may render current deep learning approaches such as convolutional feature extractors unsuitable for tactile learning. In this paper, we propose a novel spiking graph neural network for event-based tactile object recognition. To make use of local connectivity of taxels, we present several methods for organizing the tactile data in a graph structure. Based on the constructed graphs, we develop a spiking graph convolutional network. The event-driven nature of spiking neural network makes it arguably more suitable for processing the event-based data. Experimental results on two tactile datasets show that the proposed method outperforms other state-of-the-art spiking methods, achieving high accuracies of approximately 90\% when classifying a variety of different household objects.