Due to the high efficiency in extracting context information, voxel-based method is widely used in 3D object detection from point cloud. However, the quantization loss of geometric information is inevitable in the process of voxelization for raw point cloud, which may have a certain impact on final detection performance. To alleviate this problem, we propose a novel single-stage 3D detection algorithm named MFT-SSD for accurate 3D bounding box prediction. Differ from most single-stage methods, our proposed framework combines point-based and voxel-based backbones, and extracts point, multi-scale voxel and BEV features as multi-source features, respectively. In order to enhance the correlation among different representation features, we propose a transformer feature fusion module with self-attention mechanism to fully integrate these multi-source features into richer point-wise features. Then, these fused point-wise features are sent to a candidate generation layer to generate a series of candidate points closer to instance centers. The final 3D bounding boxes are predicted on these generated candidate points. Relevant experiments on KITTI and nuScenes datasets verify that our proposed algorithm has achieved a competitive level compared with some state-of-the-art algorithms.

This paper proposes a framework for a virtual entity-based rapid prototype (VERP) to facilitate the design and simulation of humanoid robots. The VERP framework consists of three components: virtual entities, a high-fidelity simulation environment with physical and rendering engines, and an interface between the physical and simulation environments. To study the effectiveness of the proposed framework, we present a complete prototype for a humanoid robot using virtual entity modelling, control algorithm design and simulation. The humanoid robot is mathematically modelled with adjustable physical parameters which determine the kinematic and dynamic behaviour of the virtual entity in the simulation environment. With the simulated model, a control scheme for the virtual entity and the actual humanoid robot are designed and implemented through the interface. The empirical experiments and numerical analysis show the effectiveness and preciseness of the proposed VERP in terms of simulation fidelity, dynamic performance, and control interface.

3D point cloud classification has wide applications in the field of scene understanding. Point cloud classification based on points can more accurately segment the boundary region between adjacent objects. In this paper, a point cloud classification algorithm based on a single point multilevel features fusion and pyramid neighborhood optimization are proposed for a Airborne Laser Scanning (ALS) point cloud. First, the proposed algorithm determines the neighborhood region of each point, after which the features of each single point are extracted. For the characteristics of the ALS point cloud, two new feature descriptors are proposed, i.e., a normal angle distribution histogram and latitude sampling histogram. Following this, multilevel features of a single point are constructed by multi-resolution of the point cloud and multi-neighborhood spaces. Next, the features are trained by the Support Vector Machine based on a Gaussian kernel function, and the points are classified by the trained model. Finally, a classification results optimization method based on a multi-scale pyramid neighborhood constructed by a multi-resolution point cloud is used. In the experiment, the algorithm is tested by a public dataset. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can effectively classify large-scale ALS point clouds. Compared with the existing algorithms, the proposed algorithm has a better classification performance.

Panoramic images have a wide range of applications in many fields with their ability to perceive all-round information. Object detection based on panoramic images has certain advantages in terms of environment perception due to the characteristics of panoramic images, e.g., lager perspective. In recent years, deep learning methods have achieved remarkable results in image classification and object detection. Their performance depends on the large amount of training data. Therefore, a good training dataset is a prerequisite for the methods to achieve better recognition results. Then, we construct a benchmark named Pano-RSOD for panoramic road scene object detection. Pano-RSOD contains vehicles, pedestrians, traffic signs and guiding arrows. The objects of Pano-RSOD are labelled by bounding boxes in the images. Different from traditional object detection datasets, Pano-RSOD contains more objects in a panoramic image, and the high-resolution images have 360-degree environmental perception, more annotations, more small objects and diverse road scenes. The state-of-the-art deep learning algorithms are trained on Pano-RSOD for object detection, which demonstrates that Pano-RSOD is a useful benchmark, and it provides a better panoramic image training dataset for object detection tasks, especially for small and deformed objects.