Search

This letter presents a novel rotation-invariant method for object detection from terrestrial 3-D laser scanning point clouds acquired in complex urban environments. We utilize the Implicit Shape Model to describe object categories, and extend the Hough Forest framework for object detection in 3-D point clouds. A 3-D local patch is described by structure and reflectance features and then mapped to the probabilistic vote about the possible location of the object center. Objects are detected at the peak points in the 3-D Hough voting space. To deal with the arbitrary azimuths of objects in real world, circular voting strategy is introduced by rotating the offset vector. To deal with the interference of adjacent objects, distance weighted voting is proposed. Large-scale real-world point cloud data collected by terrestrial mobile laser scanning systems are used to evaluate the performance. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art 3-D object detection methods. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Three-dimensional mobile mapping in indoor environment, mostly global navigation satellite system-denied space, is to consecutively align the frames to build a global 3-D map of an indoor environment. One of the major difficulties of the current solutions is the failure at the insufficient overlapping between the frames, which is the reality of a lack of correspondences between the frames. To overcome this problem, a 3-D indoor mobile mapping system that integrates a 2-D laser scanner, and an RGB-Depth camera is presented in this letter. In this system, a fusion-iterative closest point (ICP) method, which combines the 2-D mobile platform pose from a Rao–Blackwellized particle filter estimation, an ICP, and a generalized-ICP method, is proposed for the consecutive frame alignment. Fusion-ICP achieves effective frame alignment, particularly in solving the insufficient overlapping frame alignment problem. Comparative experiments were conducted to evaluate the mapping system. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our system for 3-D indoor mobile mapping. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Phototactic movement is a characteristic of some microorganisms' response to light environment. Most of the algae have dramatically phototactic responses, underlying the complicated biological, physical and photochemical mechanisms are involved. With the development of the micro/nano and sensor techniques, great progress has been made in the research of the algae phototaxis. This review article summarizes the progress made in the research on the functional phototactic structures, the mechanisms of photo-response process and photodynamics of phototaxis in algae, and describes the latest developed micro-tracking technique and micromanipulation technique. Moreover, based on our own research results, the potential correlation between the phototaxis and photosynthesis is discussed, and the directions for future research of the phototactic mechanism are proposed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]