Principal Investigator Leslie Kaelbling
Project Website http://lis.csail.mit.edu/pubs/glover-iros13.pdf
A new system for object detection in cluttered RGB-D images is presented. Our main contribution is a new method called Bingham Procrustean Alignment (BPA) to align models with the scene. BPA uses point correspondences between oriented features to derive a probability distribution over possible model poses. The orientation component of this distri- bution, conditioned on the position, is shown to be a Bingham distribution. This result also applies to the classic problem of least-squares alignment of point sets, when point features are orientation-less, and gives a principled, probabilistic way to measure pose uncertainty in the rigid alignment problem. The detection system leverages BPA to achieve more reliable object detections in clutter.