Dense Voxel 3D Reconstruction Using a Monocular Event Camera

Event cameras are sensors inspired by biological systems that specialize in capturing changes in brightness. These emerging cameras offer many advantages over conventional frame-based cameras, including high dynamic range, high frame rates, and extremely low power consumption. Due to these advantages, event cameras have increasingly been adapted in various fields, such as frame interpolation, semantic segmentation, odometry, and SLAM. However, their application in 3D reconstruction for VR applications is underexplored. Previous methods in this field mainly focused on 3D reconstruction through depth map estimation. Methods that produce dense 3D reconstruction generally require multiple cameras, while methods that utilize a single event camera can only produce a semi-dense result. Other single-camera methods that can produce dense 3D reconstruction rely on creating a pipeline that either incorporates the aforementioned methods or other existing Structure from Motion (SfM) or Multi-view Stereo (MVS) methods. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for solving dense 3D reconstruction using only a single event camera. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first attempt in this regard. Our preliminary results demonstrate that the proposed method can produce visually distinguishable dense 3D reconstructions directly without requiring pipelines like those used by existing methods. Additionally, we have created a synthetic dataset with $39,739$ object scans using an event camera simulator. This dataset will help accelerate other relevant research in this field.

PIDA: Smooth and Stable Flight Using Stochastic Dual Simplex Algorithm and Genetic Filter

This paper presents a new Proportional-Integral-Derivative-Accelerated (PIDA) control with a derivative filter to improve quadcopter flight stability in a noisy environment. The mathematical model is derived from having an accurate model with a high level of fidelity by addressing the problems of non-linearity, uncertainties, and coupling. These uncertainties and measurement noises cause instability in flight and automatic hovering. The proposed controller associated with a heuristic Genetic Filter (GF) addresses these challenges. The tuning of the proposed PIDA controller associated with the objective of controlling is performed by Stochastic Dual Simplex Algorithm (SDSA). GF is applied to the PIDA control to estimate the observed states and parameters of quadcopters in both attitude and altitude. The simulation results show that the proposed control associated with GF has a strong ability to track the desired point in the presence of disturbances.

Control Design of Autonomous Drone Using Deep Learning Based Image Understanding Techniques

This paper presents a new framework to use images as the inputs for the controller to have autonomous flight, considering the noisy indoor environment and uncertainties. A new Proportional-Integral-Derivative-Accelerated (PIDA) control with a derivative filter is proposed to improves drone/quadcopter flight stability within a noisy environment and enables autonomous flight using object and depth detection techniques. The mathematical model is derived from an accurate model with a high level of fidelity by addressing the problems of non-linearity, uncertainties, and coupling. The proposed PIDA controller is tuned by Stochastic Dual Simplex Algorithm (SDSA) to support autonomous flight. The simulation results show that adapting the deep learning-based image understanding techniques (RetinaNet ant colony detection and PSMNet) to the proposed controller can enable the generation and tracking of the desired point in the presence of environmental disturbances.

Multi-User Remote lab: Timetable Scheduling Using Simplex Nondominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm

The scheduling of multi-user remote laboratories is modeled as a multimodal function for the proposed optimization algorithm. The hybrid optimization algorithm, hybridization of the Nelder-Mead Simplex algorithm and Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm (NSGA), is proposed to optimize the timetable problem for the remote laboratories to coordinate shared access. The proposed algorithm utilizes the Simplex algorithm in terms of exploration, and NSGA for sorting local optimum points with consideration of potential areas. The proposed algorithm is applied to difficult nonlinear continuous multimodal functions, and its performance is compared with hybrid Simplex Particle Swarm Optimization, Simplex Genetic Algorithm, and other heuristic algorithms.