Monocular camera and Lidar are the two most commonly used sensors in unmanned vehicles. Combining the advantages of the two is the current research focus of SLAM and semantic analysis. In this paper, we propose an improved SLAM and semantic reconstruction method based on the fusion of Lidar and monocular vision. We fuse the semantic image with the low-resolution 3D Lidar point clouds and generate dense semantic depth maps. Through visual odometry, ORB feature points with depth information are selected to improve positioning accuracy. Our method uses parallel threads to aggregate 3D semantic point clouds while positioning the unmanned vehicle. Experiments are conducted on the public CityScapes and KITTI Visual Odometry datasets, and the results show that compared with the ORB-SLAM2 and DynaSLAM, our positioning error is approximately reduced by 87%; compared with the DEMO and DVL-SLAM, our positioning accuracy improves in most sequences. Our 3D reconstruction quality is better than DynSLAM and contains semantic information. The proposed method has engineering application value in the unmanned vehicles field.
The rapid spread of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has posed enormous challenges to the global public health system. To deal with the COVID-19 pandemic crisis, the more accurate and convenient diagnosis of patients needs to be developed. This paper proposes a deep-learning-based COVID-19 detection method and evaluates its performance on embedded edge-computing devices. By adding an attention module and mixed loss into the original VGG19 model, the method can effectively reduce the parameters of the model and increase the classification accuracy. The improved model was first trained and tested on the PC X86 GPU platform using a large dataset (COVIDx CT-2A) and a medium dataset (integrated CT scan); the weight parameters of the model were reduced by around six times compared to the original model, but it still approximately achieved 98.80%and 97.84% accuracy, outperforming most existing methods. The trained model was subsequently transferred to embedded NVIDIA Jetson devices (TX2, Nano), where it achieved 97% accuracy at a 0.6−1 FPS inference speed using the NVIDIA TensorRT engine. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method is practicable and convenient; it can be used on a low-cost medical edge-computing terminal. The source code is available on GitHub for researchers.