We present an odometry‐free three‐dimensional (3D) point cloud registration strategy for outdoor environments based on area attributed planar patches. The approach is split into three steps. The first step is to segment each point cloud into planar segments, utilizing a cached‐octree region growing algorithm, which does not require the 2.5D image‐like structure of organized point clouds. The second step is to calculate the area of each segment based on small local faces inspired by the idea of surface integrals. The third step is to find segment correspondences between overlapping point clouds using a search algorithm, and compute the transformation from determined correspondences. The transformation is searched globally so as to maximize a spherical correlation‐like metric by enumerating solutions derived from potential segment correspondences. The novelty of this step is that only the area and plane parameters of each segment are employed, and no prior pose estimation from other sensors is required. Four datasets have been used to evaluate the proposed approach, three of which are publicly available and one that stems from our custom‐built platform. Based on these datasets, the following evaluations have been done: segmentation speed benchmarking, segment area calculation accuracy and speed benchmarking, processing data acquired by scanners with different fields of view, comparison with the iterative closest point algorithm, robustness with respect to occlusions and partial observations, and registration accuracy compared to ground truth. Experimental results confirm that the approach offers an alternative to state‐of‐the‐art algorithms in plane‐rich environments.
In recent years, the reliability and safety requirements of ship systems have increased drastically. This has prompted a paradigm shift toward the development of prognostics and health management (PHM) approaches for these systems' critical maritime components. In light of harsh environmental conditions with varying operational loads, and a lack of fault labels in the maritime industry generally, any PHM solution for maritime components should include independent and intelligent fault detection algorithms that can report faults automatically. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised reconstruction-based fault detection algorithm for maritime components. The advantages of the proposed algorithm are verified on five different data sets of real operational run-to-failure data provided by a highly regarded industrial company. Each data set is subject to a fault at an unknown time step. In addition, different magnitudes of random white Gaussian noise are applied to each data set in order to create several real-life situations. The results suggest that the algorithm is highly suitable to be included as part of a pure data-driven diagnostics approach in future end-to-end PHM system solutions. INDEX TERMS Automatic fault detection, deep learning, maritime industry, prognostics and health management, unsupervised learning.
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