Autonomous Motion Intelligent Control Systems Conference Paper 2016

Depth-based Object Tracking Using a Robust Gaussian Filter

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We consider the problem of model-based 3D- tracking of objects given dense depth images as input. Two difficulties preclude the application of a standard Gaussian filter to this problem. First of all, depth sensors are characterized by fat-tailed measurement noise. To address this issue, we show how a recently published robustification method for Gaussian filters can be applied to the problem at hand. Thereby, we avoid using heuristic outlier detection methods that simply reject measurements if they do not match the model. Secondly, the computational cost of the standard Gaussian filter is prohibitive due to the high-dimensional measurement, i.e. the depth image. To address this problem, we propose an approximation to reduce the computational complexity of the filter. In quantitative experiments on real data we show how our method clearly outperforms the standard Gaussian filter. Furthermore, we compare its performance to a particle-filter-based tracking method, and observe comparable computational efficiency and improved accuracy and smoothness of the estimates.

Author(s): Issac, Jan and Wüthrich, Manuel and Garcia Cifuentes, Cristina and Bohg, Jeannette and Trimpe, Sebastian and Schaal, Stefan
Book Title: Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2016
Year: 2016
Month: May
Day: 16-21
Publisher: IEEE
Project(s):
Bibtex Type: Conference Paper (inproceedings)
DOI: 10.1109/ICRA.2016.7487184
Event Name: IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation
Event Place: Stockholm, Sweden
State: Published
URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/1602.06157
Electronic Archiving: grant_archive
Links:

BibTex

@inproceedings{jan_ICRA_2016,
  title = {Depth-based Object Tracking Using a Robust Gaussian Filter},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2016},
  abstract = {We consider the problem of model-based 3D- tracking of objects given dense depth images as input. Two difficulties preclude the application of a standard Gaussian filter to this problem. First of all, depth sensors are characterized by fat-tailed measurement noise. To address this issue, we show how a recently published robustification method for Gaussian filters can be applied to the problem at hand. Thereby, we avoid using heuristic outlier detection methods that simply reject measurements if they do not match the model. Secondly, the computational cost of the standard Gaussian filter is prohibitive due to the high-dimensional measurement, i.e. the depth image. To address this problem, we propose an approximation to reduce the computational complexity of the filter. In quantitative experiments on real data we show how our method clearly outperforms the standard Gaussian filter. Furthermore, we compare its performance to a particle-filter-based tracking method, and observe comparable computational efficiency and improved accuracy and smoothness of the estimates.},
  publisher = {IEEE},
  month = may,
  year = {2016},
  slug = {jan_icra_2016},
  author = {Issac, Jan and W{\"u}thrich, Manuel and Garcia Cifuentes, Cristina and Bohg, Jeannette and Trimpe, Sebastian and Schaal, Stefan},
  url = {http://arxiv.org/abs/1602.06157},
  month_numeric = {5}
}