Affine correspondences have received significant attention due to their benefits in tasks like image matching and pose estimation. Existing methods for extracting affine correspondences still have many limitations in terms of performance; thus, exploring a new paradigm is crucial. In this paper, we present a new pipeline designed for extracting accurate affine correspondences by integrating dense matching and geometric constraints. Specifically, a novel extraction framework is introduced, with the aid of dense matching and a novel keypoint scale and orientation estimator. For this purpose, we propose loss functions based on geometric constraints, which can effectively improve accuracy by supervising neural networks to learn feature geometry. The experimental show that the accuracy and robustness of our method outperform the existing ones in image matching tasks. To further demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, we applied it to relative pose estimation. Affine correspondences extracted by our method lead to more accurate poses than the baselines on a range of real-world datasets. The code is available at https://github.com/stilcrad/LearningACs.

Object pose tracking is one of the pivotal technologies in multimedia, attracting ever-growing attention in recent years. Existing methods employing traditional cameras encounter numerous challenges such as motion blur, sensor noise, partial occlusion, and changing lighting conditions. The emerging bio-inspired sensors, particularly event cameras, possess advantages such as high dynamic range and low latency, which hold the potential to address the aforementioned challenges. In this work, we present an optical flow-guided 6DoF object pose tracking method with an event camera. A 2D-3D hybrid feature extraction strategy is firstly utilized to detect corners and edges from events and object models, which characterizes object motion precisely. Then, we search for the optical flow of corners by maximizing the event-associated probability within a spatio-temporal window, and establish the correlation between corners and edges guided by optical flow. Furthermore, by minimizing the distances between corners and edges, the 6DoF object pose is iteratively optimized to achieve continuous pose tracking. Experimental results of both simulated and real events demonstrate that our methods outperform event-based state-of-the-art methods in terms of both accuracy and robustness.

Mobile devices equipped with a multi-camera system and an inertial measurement unit (IMU) are widely used nowadays, such as self-driving cars. The task of relative pose estimation using visual and inertial information has important applications in various fields. To improve the accuracy of relative pose estimation of multi-camera systems, we propose a globally optimal solver using affine correspondences to estimate the generalized relative pose with a known vertical direction. First, a cost function about the relative rotation angle is established after decoupling the rotation matrix and translation vector, which minimizes the algebraic error of geometric constraints from affine correspondences. Then, the global optimization problem is converted into two polynomials with two unknowns based on the characteristic equation and its first derivative is zero. Finally, the relative rotation angle can be solved using the polynomial eigenvalue solver, and the translation vector can be obtained from the eigenvector. Besides, a new linear solution is proposed when the relative rotation is small. The proposed solver is evaluated on synthetic data and real-world datasets. The experiment results demonstrate that our method outperforms comparable state-of-the-art methods in accuracy.

The first-order parallel rotating double inverted pendulum (PRDIP) is a novel underdrive benchmark system. In this paper, a mathematical model of PRDIP system based on Lagrange equation is established, which is compared with the visual model (3D mechanical model) of PRDIP system based on the MATLAB/SIMSCAPE Multibody module. Through analyzing the established mathematical model of PRDIP, it can be concluded that the PRDIP system is controllable only when the length of the two pendulums is not equal and the coefficient of friction is small. The global control of the pendulum can be divided into two parts, including swing up control and stable control, according to the movement of the pendulum within the four quadrants of its motion plane. An energy feedback based control strategy and a state feedback H∞ based control strategy are designed for the swing up control and stable control of the pendulum, respectively. In addition, a dual-mode switching global control scheme based on EFC/H∞ is proposed. The simulations using MATLAB/SIMSCAPE are demonstrated to validate the effectiveness of the proposed dual-mode switching global control scheme.