Fast Iterative Region Inflation for Computing Large 2-D/3-D Convex Regions of Obstacle-Free Space
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Convex polytopes have compact representations and exhibit convexity, which makes them suitable for abstracting obstacle-free spaces from various environments. Existing generation methods struggle with balancing high-quality output and efficiency. Moreover, another crucial requirement for convex polytopes to accurately contain certain seed point sets, such as a robot or a front-end path, is proposed in various tasks, which we refer to as manageability. In this paper, we propose Fast Iterative Regional Inflation (FIRI) to generate high-quality convex polytope while ensuring efficiency and manageability simultaneously. FIRI consists of two iteratively executed submodules: Restrictive Inflation (RsI) and Maximum Volume Inscribed Ellipsoid (MVIE) computation. By explicitly incorporating constraints that include the seed point set, RsI guarantees manageability. Meanwhile, iterative MVIE optimization ensures high-quality result through monotonic volume bound improvement. In terms of efficiency, we design methods tailored to the low-dimensional and multi-constrained nature of both modules, resulting in orders of magnitude improvement compared to generic solvers. Notably, in 2-D MVIE, we present the first linear-complexity analytical algorithm for maximum area inscribed ellipse, further enhancing the performance in 2-D cases. Extensive benchmarks conducted against state-of-the-art methods validate the superior performance of FIRI in terms of quality, manageability, and efficiency. Furthermore, various real-world applications showcase the generality and practicality of FIRI. The high-performance code of FIRI will be open-sourced.
Source: IEEE Transactions on Robotics
Authors: Qianhao Wang, Zhepei Wang, Mingyang Wang, Jialin Ji, Zhichao Han, Tianyue Wu, Rui Jin, Yuman Gao, Chao Xu, Fei Gao
Language: English
Subfield: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W4409580967