[ros-users] Open-source release: REMODE: Probabilistic, Monocular Dense Reconstruction in Real Time

[Davide Scaramuzza]

Dear colleagues,

We are happy to release an open source implementation of our approach 
for real-time, monocular, dense depth estimation, called "REMODE".

The code is available at: https://github.com/uzh-rpg/rpg_open_remode

It implements a "REgularized, probabilistic, MOnocular Depth 
Estimation", as described in the paper:

M. Pizzoli, C. Forster, D. Scaramuzza
REMODE: Probabilistic, monocular dense reconstruction in real time
IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), pp. 
2609-2616, 2014

The idea is to achieve real-time performance by combining Bayesian, 
per-pixel estimation with a fast regularization scheme that takes into 
account the measurement uncertainty to provide spatial regularity and 
mitigate the effect of noise.
Namely, a probabilistic depth measurement is carried out in real time 
for each pixel and the computed uncertainty is used to reject erroneous 
estimations and provide live feedback on the reconstruction progress.
The novelty of the regularization is that the estimated depth 
uncertainty from the per-pixel depth estimation is used to weight the 
smoothing.

Since it provides real-time, dense depth maps along with the 
corresponding confidence maps, REMODE is very suitable for robotic 
applications, such as environment interaction, motion planning, active 
vision and control, where both dense information and map uncertainty may 
be required.
More info here: http://rpg.ifi.uzh.ch/research_dense.html

The open source implementation requires a CUDA capable GPU and the 
NVIDIA CUDA Toolkit.
Instructions for building and running the code are available in the 
repository wiki.

Best regards,

Matia Pizzoli, Christian Forster, Davide Scaramuzza