Machine Learning based Mountainous Skyline Detection and Visual Geo-Localization
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Authors
Ahmad, Touqeer
Issue Date
2017
Type
Dissertation
Language
Keywords
CNN , horizon detection , machine learning , skyline detection , SVM , visual geo-localization
Alternative Title
Abstract
With the ubiquitous availability of geo-tagged imagery and increased computational power, geo-localization has captured a lot of attention from researchers in computer vision and image retrieval communities. Significant progress has been made in urban environments with stable man-made structures and geo-referenced street imagery of frequently visited tourist attractions. However, geo-localization of natural/mountain scenes is more challenging due to changed vegetations, lighting, seasonal changes and lack of geo-tagged imagery. Conventional approaches for mountain/natural geo-localization mostly rely on mountain peaks and valley information, visible skylines and ridges etc. Skyline (boundary segmenting sky and non-sky regions) has been established to be a robust natural feature for mountainous images, which can be matched with the synthetic skylines generated from publicly available terrain maps such as Digital Elevation Models (DEMs). Skyline or visible horizon finds further applications in various other contexts e.g. smooth navigation of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs)/Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs), port security, ship detection and outdoor robot/vehicle localization.\parProminent methods for skyline/horizon detection are based on non-realistic assumptions and rely on mere edge detection and/or linear line fitting using Hough transform. We investigate the use of supervised machine learning for skyline detection. Specifically we propose two novel machine learning based methods, one relying on edge detection and classification while other solely based on classification. Given a query image, an edge or classification map is first built and converted into a multi-stage graph problem. Dynamic programming is then used to find a shortest path which conforms to the detected skyline in the given image. For the first method, we provide a detailed quantitative analysis for various texture features (Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT), Local Binary Patterns (LBP), Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HOG) and their combinations) used to train a Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier and different choices (binary edges, classified edge score, gradient score and their combinations) for the nodal costs for Dynamic Programming (DP). For the second method, we investigate the use of dense classification maps for horizon line detection. We use Support Vector Machines (SVMs) and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) as our classifier choices and use normalized intensity patches as features. Both proposed formulations are compared with a prominent edge based method on two different data sets.\par We propose a fusion strategy which boosts the performance of the edge-less approach using edge information. The fusion approach, which has been tested on an additional challenging data set, outperforms each of the two methods alone. Further, we demonstrate the capability of our formulations to detect absence of horizon boundary and detection of partial horizon lines. This could be of great value in applications where a confidence measure of the detection is necessary e.g. localization of planetary rovers/robots. In an extended work, we compare our edge-less skyline detection approach against deep learning networks recently proposed for semantic segmentation on an additional data set. Specifically, we compare our proposed fusion formulation with Fully Convolutional Network (FCN), SegNet and another classical supervised learning based method.\par We further propose a visual geo-localization pipeline based on evolutionary computing; where Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) is adopted to find/refine an orientation estimate by minimizing the cost function based on horizon-ness probability of pixels. The dense classification score image resulting from our edge-less/fusion approach is used as a fitness measure to guide the particles toward best solution where the rendered horizon from DEM perfectly aligns with the actual horizon from the image without even requiring its explicit detection. The effectiveness of the proposed geo-localization pipeline is evaluated on a decent sized data set.
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In Copyright(All Rights Reserved)