A Double Branch Next-Best-View Network and Novel Robot System for Active Object Reconstruction

Next best view (NBV) is a technology that finds the best view sequence for sensor to perform scanning based on partial information, which is the core part for robot active reconstruction. Traditional works are mostly based on the evaluation of candidate views through time-consuming volu-metric transformation and ray casting, which heavily limits the applications of NBV. Recent deep learning based NBV methods aim to approximately learn the evaluation function by large-scale training, and improve both the effectiveness and efficiency of NBV. However, these methods force the network to regress the exact groundtruth value of each candidate view, which is much harder than simply ranking all the candidate views. Besides, most previous NBV works assume perfect sensing and perform in simulation environments, lacking real application abilities. In this paper, we propose a novel double branch NBV network, DB-NBV, to utilize the ranking process together with the evaluation process. We further design a real NBV robot and a pipeline to conduct real active reconstruction. Experiments on both simulation and real robot show that our method achieves the best performance and can be applied to real application with high accuracy and speed.