A map building algorithm for mobile robots is introduced in this paper. The perceived environment is represented in a map containing in each cell a probability of presence of an object or part of an object. The environment is represented as a collection of modular occupancy grids which are added to the map as far as the mobile robot finds objects outside the existing grids. In this approach a t...

This study integrates LiDAR data and topographic map information for reconstruction of 3D building models. The procedure includes feature extraction, registration and reconstruction. In this study, the tensor voting algorithm and a region-growing method with principal features are adopted to extract building roof planes and structural lines from LiDAR data. A robust least squares method is appl...

The goal of this paper is to extract automatically the building contours regardless of shape. By extracting these contours, detection results will be more accurate, giving useful information about urban area, which is important for many tasks, like map updating and disaster management. First, we extract local feature points from the image, based on a modification of Harris detector’s saliency f...

Building accurate thematic maps which show distribution of a feature over a geographic area is a challenging task when the sample dataset is limited in size and distribution. We propose the classification of these geospatial datasets as a promising approach towards building approximate thematic maps. However, choosing an appropriate classification method that considers spatial autocorrelation i...

For the Wayfarer Project, funded by the US Army through TARDEC, we have developed technologies that enable manportable PackBot Wayfarer UGVs to perform autonomous reconnaissance in urban terrain. Each Wayfarer UGV can autonomously follow urban streets and building perimeters while avoiding obstacles and building a map of the terrain. Each UGV is equipped with a 3D stereo vision system, a 360-de...

The problem visual place recognition is commonly used strategy for localization. Most successful appearance based methods typically rely on a large database of views endowed with local or global image descriptors and strive to retrieve the views of the same location. The quality of the results is often affected by the density of the reference views and the robustness of the image representation...

MOTIVATION The approaches usually used for building large genetic maps consist of dividing the marker set into linkage groups and provide local orders that can be tested by multi-point linkage analysis. To deal with the limitations of these approaches, a strategy taking the marker set into account globally is defined. RESULTS The paper presents a new approach called 'Bi-Dimensional Scaling Ma...

Map building is a classical problem in mobile and autonomous robotics, and sensor models is a way to interpret raw sensory information, especially for building maps. In this paper we propose a parameterized sensor model, and optimize map goodness with respect to these parameters. A new approach, measuring the goodness of maps without a handcrafted map of the actual environment is introduced and...

We show how a system for video-rate parallel camera tracking and 3D map-building can be readily extended to allow one or more cameras to work in several maps, separately or simultaneously. The ability to handle several thousand features per map at video-rate, and for the cameras to switch automatically between maps, allows spatially localized AR workcells to be constructed and used with very li...

People often get lost in buildings, including but not limited to libraries, hospitals, conference centers, and shopping malls. There are at least three contributing factors: the spatial structure of the building, the cognitive maps that users construct as they navigate, and the strategies and spatial abilities of the building users. The goal of this article is to discuss recent research on each...