RELEAD: Resilient Localization with Enhanced LiDAR Odometry in Adverse Environments

LiDAR-based localization is valuable for applications like mining surveys and underground facility maintenance. However, existing methods can struggle when dealing with uninformative geometric structures in challenging scenarios. This paper presents RELEAD, a LiDAR-centric solution designed to address scan-matching degradation. Our method enables degeneracy-free point cloud registration by solving constrained ESIKF updates in the front end and incorporates multisensor constraints, even when dealing with outlier measurements, through graph optimization based on Graduated Non-Convexity (GNC). Additionally, we propose a robust Incremental Fixed Lag Smoother (rIFL) for efficient GNC-based optimization. RELEAD has undergone extensive evaluation in degenerate scenarios and has outperformed existing state-of-the-art LiDAR-Inertial odometry and LiDAR-Visual-Inertial odometry methods.

Implicit Image-to-Image Schrodinger Bridge for CT Super-Resolution and Denoising

Conditional diffusion models have gained recognition for their effectiveness in image restoration tasks, yet their iterative denoising process, starting from Gaussian noise, often leads to slow inference speeds. As a promising alternative, the Image-to-Image Schr\"odinger Bridge (I2SB) initializes the generative process from corrupted images and integrates training techniques from conditional diffusion models. In this study, we extended the I2SB method by introducing the Implicit Image-to-Image Schrodinger Bridge (I3SB), transitioning its generative process to a non-Markovian process by incorporating corrupted images in each generative step. This enhancement empowers I3SB to generate images with better texture restoration using a small number of generative steps. The proposed method was validated on CT super-resolution and denoising tasks and outperformed existing methods, including the conditional denoising diffusion probabilistic model (cDDPM) and I2SB, in both visual quality and quantitative metrics. These findings underscore the potential of I3SB in improving medical image restoration by providing fast and accurate generative modeling.

CoLRIO: LiDAR-Ranging-Inertial Centralized State Estimation for Robotic Swarms

Collaborative state estimation using different heterogeneous sensors is a fundamental prerequisite for robotic swarms operating in GPS-denied environments, posing a significant research challenge. In this paper, we introduce a centralized system to facilitate collaborative LiDAR-ranging-inertial state estimation, enabling robotic swarms to operate without the need for anchor deployment. The system efficiently distributes computationally intensive tasks to a central server, thereby reducing the computational burden on individual robots for local odometry calculations. The server back-end establishes a global reference by leveraging shared data and refining joint pose graph optimization through place recognition, global optimization techniques, and removal of outlier data to ensure precise and robust collaborative state estimation. Extensive evaluations of our system, utilizing both publicly available datasets and our custom datasets, demonstrate significant enhancements in the accuracy of collaborative SLAM estimates. Moreover, our system exhibits remarkable proficiency in large-scale missions, seamlessly enabling ten robots to collaborate effectively in performing SLAM tasks. In order to contribute to the research community, we will make our code open-source and accessible at \url{https://github.com/PengYu-team/Co-LRIO}.

S3E: A Large-scale Multimodal Dataset for Collaborative SLAM

With the advanced request to employ a team of robots to perform a task collaboratively, the research community has become increasingly interested in collaborative simultaneous localization and mapping. Unfortunately, existing datasets are limited in the scale and variation of the collaborative trajectories they capture, even though generalization between inter-trajectories among different agents is crucial to the overall viability of collaborative tasks. To help align the research community's contributions with real-world multiagent ordinated SLAM problems, we introduce S3E, a novel large-scale multimodal dataset captured by a fleet of unmanned ground vehicles along four designed collaborative trajectory paradigms. S3E consists of 7 outdoor and 5 indoor scenes that each exceed 200 seconds, consisting of well synchronized and calibrated high-quality stereo camera, LiDAR, and high-frequency IMU data. Crucially, our effort exceeds previous attempts regarding dataset size, scene variability, and complexity. It has 4x as much average recording time as the pioneering EuRoC dataset. We also provide careful dataset analysis as well as baselines for collaborative SLAM and single counterparts. Find data, code, and more up-to-date information at https://github.com/PengYu-Team/S3E.

An Analysis of Scatter Characteristics in X-ray CT Spectral Correction

X-ray scatter remains a major physics challenge in volumetric computed tomography (CT), whose physical and statistical behaviors have been commonly leveraged in order to eliminate its impact on CT image quality. In this work, we conduct an in-depth derivation of how the scatter distribution and scatter to primary ratio (SPR) will change during the spectral correction, leading to an interesting finding on the property of scatter: when applying the spectral correction before scatter is removed, the impact of SPR on a CT projection will be scaled by the first derivative of the mapping function; while the scatter distribution in the transmission domain will be scaled by the product of the first derivative of the mapping function and a natural exponential of the projection difference before and after the mapping. Such a characterization of scatter's behavior provides an analytic approach of compensating for the SPR as well as approximating the change of scatter distribution after spectral correction, even though both of them might be significantly distorted as the linearization mapping function in spectral correction could vary a lot from one detector pixel to another. We conduct an evaluation of SPR compensations on a Catphan phantom and an anthropomorphic chest phantom to validate the characteristics of scatter. In addition, this scatter property is also directly adopted into CT imaging using a spectral modulator with flying focal spot technology (SMFFS) as an example to demonstrate its potential in practical applications.