Thomas Whelan

dblp:14/10989 · DBLP profile ↗
← Back
9ranked-venue papers
4as first author
2since 2021 · last 2023
—ORCID · none

Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several

Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 6 · 3 first-author · 1 since 2021Systems, architecture and hardware · 4 · 2 first-authorGraphics, computer vision, multimedia, augmented reality and games · 3 · 1 first-author · 2 since 2021Human-computer interaction and ubiquitous computing · 1

Expertise — from the expertise taxonomy: the topics of the expert's papers under the CCF categories. A weight counts papers with recency: 1 for a paper about the topic, 0.3 when the topic is its context, halved every five years.

Artificial intelligence
4 papers
3D vision · 60% Segmentation and scene understanding · 16% Video understanding and tracking · 13%
Computer graphics and multimedia
2 papers
Virtual and augmented reality · 100%

Topics — the 13 heaviest of 15, each with the papers that count most for it

TopicWeightPapersLastEvidence papers
Computer vision › 3D vision › 3d object detection
3d object detection and tracking
0.712023
Aria Digital Twin: A New Benchmark Dataset for Egocentric 3D Machine Perception · ICCV 2023
Computer vision › 3D vision
3d scene reconstruction
0.712023
Aria Digital Twin: A New Benchmark Dataset for Egocentric 3D Machine Perception · ICCV 2023
Computer vision › 3D vision › 3d scene understanding
egocentric 3d perception
0.712023
Aria Digital Twin: A New Benchmark Dataset for Egocentric 3D Machine Perception · ICCV 2023
Computer vision › Video understanding and tracking › multi-object tracking
object detection and tracking
0.712023
Aria Digital Twin: A New Benchmark Dataset for Egocentric 3D Machine Perception · ICCV 2023
Computer vision › Segmentation and scene understanding
scene understanding
0.712023
Aria Digital Twin: A New Benchmark Dataset for Egocentric 3D Machine Perception · ICCV 2023
Computer vision › 3D vision
3d reconstruction
0.422018
Reconstructing scenes with mirror and glass surfaces · ACM Trans. Graph. 2018
A benchmark for RGB-D visual odometry, 3D reconstruction and SLAM · ICRA 2014
Computer vision › 3D vision › 3d reconstruction › surface reconstruction
planar surface reconstruction
0.312018
Reconstructing scenes with mirror and glass surfaces · ACM Trans. Graph. 2018
Computer vision › 3D vision › 3d reconstruction › non-lambertian surface reconstruction
reflective surface reconstruction
0.312018
Reconstructing scenes with mirror and glass surfaces · ACM Trans. Graph. 2018
Computer vision › Segmentation and scene understanding › image segmentation
map segmentation
0.212014
Efficient incremental map segmentation in dense RGB-D maps · ICRA 2014
Robotics › Robot navigation and mapping › robot mapping › visual mapping
RGB-D mapping
0.212014
Efficient incremental map segmentation in dense RGB-D maps · ICRA 2014
Robotics › Robot navigation and mapping › SLAM › visual SLAM
RGB-D SLAM
0.212014
A benchmark for RGB-D visual odometry, 3D reconstruction and SLAM · ICRA 2014
Robotics › Robot navigation and mapping
visual odometry and SLAM
0.212014
A benchmark for RGB-D visual odometry, 3D reconstruction and SLAM · ICRA 2014
Computer vision › 3D vision › 3d reconstruction
surface reconstruction
0.112014
A benchmark for RGB-D visual odometry, 3D reconstruction and SLAM · ICRA 2014

Methods — techniques the papers use, named apart from their topics

sim-to-real learning · 1.3image translation · 1.3plane segmentation · 0.3apriltag fiducial · 0.3iterative voting · 0.2ground truth evaluation · 0.2benchmark dataset · 0.2kinectfusion · 0.2GPU-based implementation · 0.2
YearPublicationVenuePosition
2023 Aria Digital Twin: A New Benchmark Dataset for Egocentric 3D Machine Perception
abstract
We introduce the Aria Digital Twin (ADT)1- an egocentric dataset captured using Aria glasses with extensive object, environment, and human level ground truth. This ADT release contains 200 sequences of real-world activities conducted by Aria wearers in two real indoor scenes with 398 object instances (344 stationary and 74 dynamic). Each sequence consists of: a) raw data of two monochrome camera streams, one RGB camera stream, two IMU streams; b) complete sensor calibration; c) ground truth data including continuous 6-degree-of-freedom (6DoF) poses of the Aria devices, object 6DoF poses, 3D eye gaze vectors, 3D human poses, 2D image segmentations, image depth maps; and d) photo-realistic synthetic renderings. To the best of our knowledge, there is no existing egocentric dataset with a level of accuracy, photo-realism and comprehensiveness comparable to ADT. By contributing ADT to the research community, our mission is to set a new standard for evaluation in the egocentric machine perception domain, which includes very challenging research problems such as 3D object detection and tracking, scene reconstruction and understanding, sim-to-real learning, human pose prediction - while also inspiring new machine perception tasks for augmented reality (AR) applications. To kick start exploration of the ADT research use cases, we evaluated several existing state-of-the-art methods for object detection, segmentation and image translation tasks that demonstrate the usefulness of ADT as a benchmarking dataset.
Xiaqing Pan, Nicholas Charron, Yongqian Yang, Scott Peters, Thomas Whelan, Chen Kong, Omkar M. Parkhi, Richard A. Newcombe, Carl Yuheng Ren
ICCV5
2021 Recovering Real-World Reflectance Properties and Shading From HDR Imagery
abstract
We propose a method to estimate the bidirectional reflectance distribution function (BRDF) and shading of complete scenes under static illumination given the 3D scene geometry and a corresponding high dynamic range (HDR) video. By splitting the BRDF into its diffuse and non-diffuse parts we solve the estimation of each component separately. For the diffuse component, we sample the incident illumination at each point in the scene using Monte Carlo ray tracing, allowing us to factor the captured surface color into albedo and shading. We then use a novel ray tracing-based optimization strategy to estimate the non-diffuse parameters of the BRDF. In a variety of experiments, we demonstrate that our method efficiently generates realistic copies of the observed scenes.
Bjoern Haefner, Simon Green, Alan Oursland, Daniel Andersen, Michael Goesele, Daniel Cremers, Richard A. Newcombe, Thomas Whelan
3DV8
2018 Reconstructing scenes with mirror and glass surfaces
abstract
Planar reflective surfaces such as glass and mirrors are notoriously hard to reconstruct for most current 3D scanning techniques. When treated naïvely, they introduce duplicate scene structures, effectively destroying the reconstruction altogether. Our key insight is that an easy to identify structure attached to the scanner---in our case an AprilTag---can yield reliable information about the existence and the geometry of glass and mirror surfaces in a scene. We introduce a fully automatic pipeline that allows us to reconstruct the geometry and extent of planar glass and mirror surfaces while being able to distinguish between the two. Furthermore, our system can automatically segment observations of multiple reflective surfaces in a scene based on their estimated planes and locations. In the proposed setup, minimal additional hardware is needed to create high-quality results. We demonstrate this using reconstructions of several scenes with a variety of real mirrors and glass.
Thomas Whelan, Michael Goesele, Steven Lovegrove, Julian Straub, Simon Green, Richard Szeliski, Steven Butterfield, Shobhit Verma, Richard A. Newcombe
ACM Trans. Graph.1
2014 Efficient incremental map segmentation in dense RGB-D maps
abstract
In this paper we present a method for incrementally segmenting large RGB-D maps as they are being created. Recent advances in dense RGB-D mapping have led to maps of increasing size and density. Segmentation of these raw maps is a first step for higher-level tasks such as object detection. Current popular methods of segmentation scale linearly with the size of the map and generally include all points. Our method takes a previously segmented map and segments new data added to that map incrementally online. Segments in the existing map are re-segmented with the new data based on an iterative voting method. Our segmentation method works in maps with loops to combine partial segmentations from each traversal into a complete segmentation model. We verify our algorithm on multiple real-world datasets spanning many meters and millions of points in real-time. We compare our method against a popular batch segmentation method for accuracy and timing complexity.
Ross Finman, Thomas Whelan, Michael Kaess, John J. Leonard
ICRA2
2014 A benchmark for RGB-D visual odometry, 3D reconstruction and SLAM
abstract
We introduce the Imperial College London and National University of Ireland Maynooth (ICL-NUIM) dataset for the evaluation of visual odometry, 3D reconstruction and SLAM algorithms that typically use RGB-D data. We present a collection of handheld RGB-D camera sequences within synthetically generated environments. RGB-D sequences with perfect ground truth poses are provided as well as a ground truth surface model that enables a method of quantitatively evaluating the final map or surface reconstruction accuracy. Care has been taken to simulate typically observed real-world artefacts in the synthetic imagery by modelling sensor noise in both RGB and depth data. While this dataset is useful for the evaluation of visual odometry and SLAM trajectory estimation, our main focus is on providing a method to benchmark the surface reconstruction accuracy which to date has been missing in the RGB-D community despite the plethora of ground truth RGB-D datasets available.
Ankur Handa, Thomas Whelan, John McDonald 0001, Andrew J. Davison
ICRA2
2013 Robust real-time visual odometry for dense RGB-D mapping
abstract
This paper describes extensions to the Kintinuous [1] algorithm for spatially extended KinectFusion, incorporating the following additions: (i) the integration of multiple 6DOF camera odometry estimation methods for robust tracking; (ii) a novel GPU-based implementation of an existing dense RGB-D visual odometry algorithm; (iii) advanced fused realtime surface coloring. These extensions are validated with extensive experimental results, both quantitative and qualitative, demonstrating the ability to build dense fully colored models of spatially extended environments for robotics and virtual reality applications while remaining robust against scenes with challenging sets of geometric and visual features.
Thomas Whelan, Hordur Johannsson, Michael Kaess, John J. Leonard, John McDonald 0001
ICRA1
2013 Deformation-based loop closure for large scale dense RGB-D SLAM
abstract
In this paper we present a system for capturing large scale dense maps in an online setting with a low cost RGB-D sensor. Central to this work is the use of an “as-rigid-as-possible” space deformation for efficient dense map correction in a pose graph optimisation framework. By combining pose graph optimisation with non-rigid deformation of a dense map we are able to obtain highly accurate dense maps over large scale trajectories that are both locally and globally consistent. With low latency in mind we derive an incremental method for deformation graph construction, allowing multi-million point maps to be captured over hundreds of metres in real-time. We provide benchmark results on a well established RGB-D SLAM dataset demonstrating the accuracy of the system and also provide a number of our own datasets which cover a wide range of environments, both indoors, outdoors and across multiple floors.
Thomas Whelan, Michael Kaess, John J. Leonard, John McDonald 0001
IROS1
2011 Line Point Registration: A Technique for Enhancing Robot Localization in a Soccer Environment
Thomas Whelan, Sonja Stüdli, John McDonald 0001, Rick Middleton
RoboCup1
2011 Teaching discrete structures: a systematic review of the literature
abstract
This survey paper reviews a large sample of publications on the teaching of discrete structures and discrete mathematics in computer science curricula. The approach is systematic, in that a structured search of electronic resources has been conducted, and the results are presented and quantitatively analyzed. A number of broad themes in discrete structures education are identified relating to course content, teaching strategies and the means of evaluating the success of a course.
James F. Power, Thomas Whelan, Susan Bergin
SIGCSE2