This article presents a visual–inertial dataset gathered in indoor and outdoor scenarios with a handheld custom sensor rig, for over 80 min in total. The dataset contains hardware-synchronized data from a commercial stereo camera (Bumblebee®2), a custom stereo rig, and an inertial measurement unit. The most distinctive feature of this dataset is the strong presence of low-textured environments and scenes with dynamic illumination, which are recurrent corner cases of visual odometry and simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) methods. The dataset comprises 32 sequences and is provided with ground-truth poses at the beginning and the end of each of the sequences, thus allowing the accumulated drift to be measured in each case. We provide a trial evaluation of five existing state-of-the-art visual and visual–inertial methods on a subset of the dataset. We also make available open-source tools for evaluation purposes, as well as the intrinsic and extrinsic calibration parameters of all sensors in the rig. The dataset is available for download at http://mapir.uma.es/work/uma-visual-inertial-dataset
This paper addresses appearance-based robot localization in 2D with a sparse, lightweight map of the environment composed of descriptor–pose image pairs. Based on previous research in the field, we assume that image descriptors are samples of a low-dimensional Descriptor Manifold that is locally articulated by the camera pose. We propose a piecewise approximation of the geometry of such Descriptor Manifold through a tessellation of so-called Patches of Smooth Appearance Change (PSACs), which defines our appearance map. Upon this map, the presented robot localization method applies both a Gaussian Process Particle Filter (GPPF) to perform camera tracking and a Place Recognition (PR) technique for relocalization within the most likely PSACs according to the observed descriptor. A specific Gaussian Process (GP) is trained for each PSAC to regress a Gaussian distribution over the descriptor for any particle pose lying within that PSAC. The evaluation of the observed descriptor in this distribution gives us a likelihood, which is used as the weight for the particle. Besides, we model the impact of appearance variations on image descriptors as a white noise distribution within the GP formulation, ensuring adequate operation under lighting and scene appearance changes with respect to the conditions in which the map was constructed. A series of experiments with both real and synthetic images show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art appearance-based localization methods in terms of robustness and accuracy, with median errors below 0.3 m and 6∘.
This work describes a real application of artificial olfaction where a handheld electronic nose was used as a validation tool for a chemical spillage in a southern town in Spain. The objective was to check if the palliative and precautionary measurements taken by the authorities were working effectively, removing the elevated values of phenol that were detected in a wide area of the municipality of Coria del Río (Spain). To this end, a gas distribution map of the affected neighborhoods was built with a portable electronic nose taking into consideration the likely presence of other volatile chemicals in the area. For the latter, we trained a volatile chemical classifier with a dataset of typical urban smells that we wanted to remove from the results (e.g. traffic emissions, garbage, fresh-air), as well as with a specific air-born phenol dataset. Results demonstrated that the palliative measures were in general satisfactory, but some hot-spots were located where the intensity of phenol-like smell was still higher than desired. Advice was given to the local authorities to doublecheck these locations with analytical gas-monitoring equipment.
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