Patrick Beeson

This code implements an extension of the pixel-based "thinning" algorithm that finds skeletons of bitmaps. The classic thinning algorithm is a fast approximation of the Voronoi diagram; however, this software also approximates the Extended Voronoi graph. This code was written to be applied in real-time to occupancy grids (from the mobile robotics literature) where cells are either occupied, free, or unknown, but it should work on bitmap images for other domains.

This code implements Dieter Fox's KLD-sampling algorithm (KLD stands for Kullback-Leibler distance). When using particle filters to approximate an unknown distribution, too few particles may not adequately sample the underlying distribution, while too many samples can increase the run time of time sensitive programs (e.g. particle filter localization for a mobile robot). Running this program demonstrates how different KLD-sampling parameters affect both the number of samples and the estimated mean and variance of the underlying distribution. This sample program assumes a 1D underlying distribution, but the provided KLD-sampling module works on multivariate distributions.