Online semantic 3D segmentation in company with realtime RGB-D reconstruction poses special challenges such as how to perform 3D convolution directly over the progressively fused 3D geometric data, and how to smartly fuse information from frame to frame. We propose a novel fusionaware 3D point convolution which operates directly on the geometric surface being reconstructed and exploits effectively the inter-frame correlation for high quality 3D feature learning. This is enabled by a dedicated dynamic data structure which organizes the online acquired point cloud with global-local trees. Globally, we compile the online reconstructed 3D points into an incrementally growing coordinate interval tree, enabling fast point insertion and neighborhood query. Locally, we maintain the neighborhood information for each point using an octree whose construction benefits from the fast query of the global tree. Both levels of trees update dynamically and help the 3D convolution effectively exploits the temporal coherence for effective information fusion across RGB-D frames. Through evaluation on public benchmark datasets, we show that our method achieves the state-of-the-art accuracy of semantic segmentation with online RGB-D fusion in 10 FPS.

We propose a novel approach to robot‐operated active understanding of unknown indoor scenes, based on online RGBD reconstruction with semantic segmentation. In our method, the exploratory robot scanning is both driven by and targeting at the recognition and segmentation of semantic objects from the scene. Our algorithm is built on top of a volumetric depth fusion framework and performs real‐time voxel‐based semantic labeling over the online reconstructed volume. The robot is guided by an online estimated discrete viewing score field (VSF) parameterized over the 3D space of 2D location and azimuth rotation. VSF stores for each grid the score of the corresponding view, which measures how much it reduces the uncertainty (entropy) of both geometric reconstruction and semantic labeling. Based on VSF, we select the next best views (NBV) as the target for each time step. We then jointly optimize the traverse path and camera trajectory between two adjacent NBVs, through maximizing the integral viewing score (information gain) along path and trajectory. Through extensive evaluation, we show that our method achieves efficient and accurate online scene parsing during exploratory scanning.

Online reconstruction based on RGB-D sequences has thus far been restrained to relatively slow camera motions (<1m/s). Under very fast camera motion (e.g., 3m/s), the reconstruction can easily crumble even for the state-of-the-art methods. Fast motion brings two challenges to depth fusion: 1) the high nonlinearity of camera pose optimization due to large inter-frame rotations and 2) the lack of reliably trackable features due to motion blur. We propose to tackle the difficulties of fast-motion camera tracking in the absence of inertial measurements using random optimization, in particular, the Particle Filter Optimization (PFO). To surmount the computation-intensive particle sampling and update in standard PFO, we propose to accelerate the randomized search via updating a particle swarm template (PST). PST is a set of particles pre-sampled uniformly within the unit sphere in the 6D space of camera pose. Through moving and rescaling the pre-sampled PST guided by swarm intelligence, our method is able to drive tens of thousands of particles to locate and cover a good local optimum extremely fast and robustly. The particles, representing candidate poses, are evaluated with a fitness function defined based on depth-model conformance. Therefore, our method, being depth-only and correspondence-free, mitigates the motion blur impediment as (ToF-based) depths are often resilient to motion blur. Thanks to the efficient template-based particle set evolution and the effective fitness function, our method attains good quality pose tracking under fast camera motion (up to 4m/s) in a realtime framerate without including loop closure or global pose optimization. Through extensive evaluations on public datasets of RGB-D sequences, especially on a newly proposed benchmark of fast camera motion, we demonstrate the significant advantage of our method over the state of the arts.

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Figure 1: We introduce a method for robot-operated active semantic understanding of unknown indoor scenes, based on online RGBD reconstruction with semantic segmentation. The method performs online volumetric RGBD reconstruction, on which real-time voxel-based semantic labeling is conducted. The robot is guided by the requirement of fast online segmentation with minimal scanning effort. The image to the left shows the robot paths computed by our method and the corresponding scene parsing results (correspondence indicated by color) are shown to the right.

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