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Only released in EOL distros:  

rail_object_detection: rail_object_detection_msgs | rail_object_detector

Package Summary

The rail_object_detector package

Two Minute Intro

This package includes two object detectors which you may choose between, YOLOv2 and Deformable R-FCN (DRFCN). Detections from YOLOv2 are a bit faster, >10fps compared to ~4fps (on a Titan X), but less accurate than the detections from DRFCN.

The YOLOv2 detector uses darknet to perform object detection. It provides the ability to query for objects in an image through both services as well as from a topic.

The Deformable R-FCN detector is built on MXNet, and provides the ability to query for objects from a topic.

The nodes in this package publish a list of objects within a given image, each of which has the following properties:

  1. label

  2. probability - confidence value in recognition

  3. centroid_x - X pixel value of the centroid of the bounding box

  4. centroid_y - Y pixel value of the centroid of the bounding box

  5. left_bot_x - X pixel value of bottom-left corner of bounding box

  6. left_bot_y - Y pixel value of bottom-left corner of bounding box

  7. right_top_x - X pixel value of top-right corner of bounding box

  8. right_top_x - X pixel value of top-right corner of bounding box

The DRFCN detector requires a CUDA and cuDNN capable GPU, so it is not installed by default. In order to use it, we recommend getting this code from Github and following the instructions in the README. The rest of this documentation covers instructions for a CPU-only install of this package that uses darknet.

Querying through services

There are two modes of querying:

Scene Queries are served by first subscribing to an existing camera sensor topic. Then at the moment of the query, we run object recognition on the latest frame from the camera and the resulting objects in that scene are returned after however long darknet takes.

Image Queries require an image to be sent alongwith the query. Object recognition is performed on this input image, and the detected objects as well as the original image are sent back.

Querying through topic

If enabled, the detector subscribes to an existing camera sensor topic and grabs images from this camera at (prespecified) intervals. After performing object detection on the grabbed image, the detector publishes the list of objects that were found to the query topic and with the timestamp of the image which was grabbed for detection.

The interval for grabbing images is specified in the form of a frequency. If the desired frequency exceeds the maximum frequency of operation of the detector (~1 Hz on CPU), we limit to the maximum frequency of operation.

Nodes

This package contains a single ROS node - darknet_node - which serves as an interface between a ROS system and the trained object recognition network.

darknet_node

Services

darknet_node/objects_in_scene

Type: rail_object_detector/SceneQuery

Scene Query service: recognize objects in the latest image from the camera stream image_sub_topic_name. Takes no input, and outputs a list of detected, labeled objects and a corresponding image. Only advertised if use_scene_service is true.

darknet_node/objects_in_image

Type: rail_object_detector/ImageQuery

Image Query service: recognize objects in an image passed to the service. Takes an image as input, and outputs a list of detected, labeled objects and a corresponding image. Only advertised if use_image_service is true.

Topics

darknet_node/detections

Type: object_detector/detections

Topic with object detections performed in the background by grabbing images at a specified interval. Only advertised if publish_detections_topic is true.

Parameters

num_service_threads

Type: int

Default: 0

Number of asynchronous threads that can be used to service each of the services. 0 implies the use of one thread per processor

use_scene_service

Type: bool

Default: true

Enable or disable Scene Query service

use_image_service

Type: bool

Default: false

Enable or disable Image Query service

publish_detections_topic

Type: bool

Default: false

Enable or disable Detections topic

image_sub_topic_name

Type: string

Default: "/kinect/hd/image_color_rect"

Image topic name to subscribe to for the Scene Query service or the Detections topic

max_desired_publish_freq

Type: float

Default: 1.0

Desired frequency of object detection. If frequency exceeds maximum detector frequency that Darknet can manage, the desired value will not be achieved

probability_threshold

Type: float

Default: 0.25

Confidence value in recognition below which a detected object is treated as unrecognized

classnames_filename

Type: string

Default: "$(find rail_object_detector)/libs/darknet/data/coco.names"

Trained labels file for Darknet. Make sure to use an absolute path. See Darknet for details on file itself.

cfg_filename

Type: string

Default: "$(find rail_object_detector)/libs/darknet/cfg/yolo.cfg"

Configuration file for Darknet. Make sure to use an absolute path. See Darknet for details on file itself.

weight_filename

Type: string

Default: "$(find rail_object_detector)/libs/darknet/yolo.weights"

Trained weights file for Darknet. Make sure to use an absolute path. See Darknet for details on file itself.

A good set of weights, to complement the default trained labels can be obtained from this Google Drive link.

GPU and MXNet

To build using CUDA, obtain the package from Github and follow the instructions in the README. This is necessary if you wish to use the Deformable R-FCN detector.

Training

The underlying Darknet code has been copied as is. So the detector can be trained and retrained following instructions on the Darknet website.

The same is true for the Deformable R-FCN. Check the DRFCN code for details.


2022-05-28 12:55