This paper deals with new augmentation methods for an unconventional imaging modality sensitive to the physics of the observed scene called polarimetry. In nature, polarized light is obtained by reflection or scattering. Robotics applications in urban environments are subject to many obstacles that can be specular and therefore provide polarized light. These areas are prone to segmentation errors using standard modalities but could be solved using information carried by the polarized light. Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNNs) have shown excellent segmentation results, but require a significant amount of data to achieve best performances. The lack of data is usually overcomed by using augmentation methods. However, unlike RGB images, polarization images are not only scalar (intensity) images and standard augmentation techniques cannot be applied straightforwardly. We propose enhancing deep learning models through a regularized augmentation procedure applied to polarimetric data in order to characterize scenes more effectively under challenging conditions. We subsequently observe an average of 18.1 % improvement in IoU between not augmented and regularized training procedures on real world data.

Monocular depth estimation is a recurring subject in the field of computer vision. Its ability to describe scenes via a depth map while reducing the constraints related to the formulation of perspective geometry tends to favor its use. However, despite the constant improvement of algorithms, most methods exploit only colorimetric information. Consequently, robustness to events to which the modality is not sensitive to, like specularity or transparency, is neglected. In response to this phenomenon, we propose using polarimetry as an input for a self-supervised monodepth network. Therefore, we propose exploiting polarization cues to encourage accurate reconstruction of scenes. Furthermore, we include a term of polarimetric regularization to state-of-the-art method to take specific advantage of the data. Our method is evaluated both qualitatively and quantitatively demonstrating that the contribution of this new information as well as an enhanced loss function improves depth estimation results, especially for specular areas.

Many fields of application could benefit from an accurate registration of measurements of different modalities over a known 3D model. However, aligning a 2D image to a 3D model is a challenging task and is even more complex when the two have a different modality. Most of the 2D/3D registration methods are based on either geometric or dense visual features. Both have their own advantages and their own drawbacks. We propose, in this paper, to mutually exploit the advantages of one feature type to reduce the drawbacks of the other one. For this, an hybrid registration framework has been designed to mutually align geometrical and dense visual features in order to obtain an accurate final 2D/3D alignment. We evaluate and compare the proposed registration method on real data acquired by a robot equipped with several visual sensors. The results highlights the robustness of the method and its ability to produce wide convergence domain and a high registration accuracy.

In the robotic field, navigation and path planning applications benefit from a wide range of visual systems (e.g, perspective cameras, depth cameras, catadioptric cameras, etc.). In outdoor conditions, these systems capture information in which sky regions cover a major segment of the images acquired. However, sky regions are discarded and are not considered as visual cue in vision applications. In this paper, we propose to estimate attitude of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) from sky information using a polarimetric camera. Theoretically, we provide a framework estimating the attitude from the skylight polarized patterns. We showcase this formulation on both simulated and real-word data sets which proved the benefit of using polarimetric sensors along with other visual sensors in robotic applications.

This paper proposes a novel approach of line matching across images captured by different types of cameras, from perspective to omnidirectional ones. Based on the spherical mapping, this method utilizes spherical SIFT point features to boost line matching and searches line correspondences using an affine invariant measure of similarity. It permits to unify the commonest cameras and to process heterogeneous images with the least distortion of visual information.