Publications by authors named "Michiel Vlaminck"

Today, solar energy is taking an increasing share of the total energy mix. Unfortunately, many operational photovoltaic plants suffer from a plenitude of defects resulting in non-negligible power loss. The latter highly impacts the overall performance of the PV site; therefore, operators need to regularly inspect their solar parks for anomalies in order to prevent severe performance drops.

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The installation of solar plants everywhere in the world increases year by year. Automated diagnostic methods are needed to inspect the solar plants and to identify anomalies within these photovoltaic panels. The inspection is usually carried out by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) using thermal imaging sensors.

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In this paper, we present a complete loop detection and correction system developed for data originating from lidar scanners. Regarding detection, we propose a combination of a global point cloud matcher with a novel registration algorithm to determine loop candidates in a highly effective way. The registration method can deal with point clouds that are largely deviating in orientation while improving the efficiency over existing techniques.

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In this paper, we propose a novel approach to obtain accurate 3D reconstructions of large-scale environments by means of a mobile acquisition platform. The system incorporates a Velodyne LiDAR scanner, as well as a Point Grey Ladybug panoramic camera system. It was designed with genericity in mind, and hence, it does not make any assumption about the scene or about the sensor set-up.

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