Video: https://slideslive.com/38930755/deep-direct-visual-slam

Abstract: The reconstruction of our 3D world from moving cameras is among the central challenges in computer vision. I will present recent developments in camera-based reconstruction of the world. In particular, I will discuss direct methods for visual SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping). These recover camera motion and 3D structure directly from brightness consistency thereby providing better performance in terms of precision and robustness compared to classical keypoint-based techniques. Moreover, I will demonstrate how we can leverage the predictive power of deep networks in order to significantly boost the performance of direct SLAM methods. The resulting methods allow us to track a single camera with a precision that is on par with state-of-the-art stereo-inertial odometry methods. Moreover, we can relocalize a moving vehicle with respect to a previously generated map despite significant changes in illumination and weather.

Bio: Daniel Cremers received a PhD in Computer Science (2002) from the University of Mannheim, Germany. Subsequently he spent two years as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) and one year as a permanent researcher at Siemens Corporate Research in Princeton, NJ. From 2005 until 2009 he was associate professor at the University of Bonn. Since 2009 he holds the Chair of Computer Vision and Artificial Intelligence at the Technical University of Munich. His publications received numerous awards, including the 'Best Paper of the Year 2003' (Int. Pattern Recognition Society), the 'Olympus Award 2004' (German Soc. for Pattern Recognition) and the '2005 UCLA Chancellor's Award for Postdoctoral Research'. For pioneering research he received five grants from the European Research Council, including a Starting Grant, a Consolidator Grant and an Advanced Grant. In 2018 he organized the largest ever European Conference on Computer Vision in Munich. He is member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities. In December 2010 he was listed among "Germany's top 40 researchers below 40" (Capital). On March 1st 2016, Prof. Cremers received the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Award, the biggest award in German academia. He is co-founder of several companies, most recently the high-tech startup Artisense.