FPGA Based Pattern Generation and Synchonization for High Speed Structured Light 3D Camera

Recently, structured light 3D imaging devices have gained a keen attention due to their potential applications to robotics, industrial manufacturing and medical imaging. Most of these applications require high 3D precision yet high speed in image capturing for hard and/or soft real time environments. This paper presents a method of high speed image capturing for structured light 3D imaging sensors with FPGA based structured light pattern generation and projector-camera synchronization. Suggested setup reduces the time for pattern projection and camera triggering to 16msec from 100msec that should be required by conventional methods

Novel entropy coding and its application of the compression of 3D image and video signals

This thesis was submitted for the award of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel University LondonThe broadcast industry is moving future Digital Television towards Super high resolution TV (4k or 8k) and/or 3D TV. This ultimately will increase the demand on data rate and subsequently the demand for highly efficient codecs. One of the techniques that researchers found it one of the promising technologies in the industry in the next few years is 3D Integral Image and Video due to its simplicity and mimics the reality, independently on viewer aid, one of the challenges of the 3D Integral technology is to improve the compression algorithms to adequate the high resolution and exploit the advantages of the characteristics of this technology. The research scope of this thesis includes designing a novel coding for the 3D Integral image and video compression. Firstly to address the compression of 3D Integral imaging the research proposes novel entropy coding which will be implemented first on 2D traditional images content in order to compare it with the other traditional common standards then will be applied on 3D Integra image and video. This approach seeks to achieve high performance represented by high image quality and low bit rate in association with low computational complexity. Secondly, new algorithm will be proposed in an attempt to improve and develop the transform techniques performance, initially by using a new adaptive 3D-DCT algorithm then by proposing a new hybrid 3D DWT-DCT algorithm via exploiting the advantages of each technique and get rid of the artifact that each technique of them suffers from. Finally, the proposed entropy coding will be further implemented to the 3D integral video in association with another proposed algorithm that based on calculating the motion vector on the average viewpoint for each frame. This approach seeks to minimize the complexity and reduce the speed without affecting the Human Visual System (HVS) performance. Number of block matching techniques will be used to investigate the best block matching technique that is adequate for the new proposed 3D integral video algorithm

Action Recognition in Videos: from Motion Capture Labs to the Web

This paper presents a survey of human action recognition approaches based on visual data recorded from a single video camera. We propose an organizing framework which puts in evidence the evolution of the area, with techniques moving from heavily constrained motion capture scenarios towards more challenging, realistic, "in the wild" videos. The proposed organization is based on the representation used as input for the recognition task, emphasizing the hypothesis assumed and thus, the constraints imposed on the type of video that each technique is able to address. Expliciting the hypothesis and constraints makes the framework particularly useful to select a method, given an application. Another advantage of the proposed organization is that it allows categorizing newest approaches seamlessly with traditional ones, while providing an insightful perspective of the evolution of the action recognition task up to now. That perspective is the basis for the discussion in the end of the paper, where we also present the main open issues in the area.Comment: Preprint submitted to CVIU, survey paper, 46 pages, 2 figures, 4 table

A family of stereoscopic image compression algorithms using wavelet transforms

With the standardization of JPEG-2000, wavelet-based image and video compression technologies are gradually replacing the popular DCT-based methods. In parallel to this, recent developments in autostereoscopic display technology is now threatening to revolutionize the way in which consumers are used to enjoying the traditional 2-D display based electronic media such as television, computer and movies. However, due to the two-fold bandwidth/storage space requirement of stereoscopic imaging, an essential requirement of a stereo imaging system is efficient data compression. In this thesis, seven wavelet-based stereo image compression algorithms are proposed, to take advantage of the higher data compaction capability and better flexibility of wavelets. [Continues.

Computational Modeling of Human Dorsal Pathway for Motion Processing

Reliable motion estimation in videos is of crucial importance for background iden- tification, object tracking, action recognition, event analysis, self-navigation, etc. Re- constructing the motion field in the 2D image plane is very challenging, due to variations in image quality, scene geometry, lighting condition, and most importantly, camera jit- tering. Traditional optical flow models assume consistent image brightness and smooth motion field, which are violated by unstable illumination and motion discontinuities that are common in real world videos. To recognize observer (or camera) motion robustly in complex, realistic scenarios, we propose a biologically-inspired motion estimation system to overcome issues posed by real world videos. The bottom-up model is inspired from the infrastructure as well as functionalities of human dorsal pathway, and the hierarchical processing stream can be divided into three stages: 1) spatio-temporal processing for local motion, 2) recogni- tion for global motion patterns (camera motion), and 3) preemptive estimation of object motion. To extract effective and meaningful motion features, we apply a series of steer- able, spatio-temporal filters to detect local motion at different speeds and directions, in a way that\u27s selective of motion velocity. The intermediate response maps are cal- ibrated and combined to estimate dense motion fields in local regions, and then, local motions along two orthogonal axes are aggregated for recognizing planar, radial and circular patterns of global motion. We evaluate the model with an extensive, realistic video database that collected by hand with a mobile device (iPad) and the video content varies in scene geometry, lighting condition, view perspective and depth. We achieved high quality result and demonstrated that this bottom-up model is capable of extracting high-level semantic knowledge regarding self motion in realistic scenes. Once the global motion is known, we segment objects from moving backgrounds by compensating for camera motion. For videos captured with non-stationary cam- eras, we consider global motion as a combination of camera motion (background) and object motion (foreground). To estimate foreground motion, we exploit corollary dis- charge mechanism of biological systems and estimate motion preemptively. Since back- ground motions for each pixel are collectively introduced by camera movements, we apply spatial-temporal averaging to estimate the background motion at pixel level, and the initial estimation of foreground motion is derived by comparing global motion and background motion at multiple spatial levels. The real frame signals are compared with those derived by forward predictions, refining estimations for object motion. This mo- tion detection system is applied to detect objects with cluttered, moving backgrounds and is proved to be efficient in locating independently moving, non-rigid regions. The core contribution of this thesis is the invention of a robust motion estimation system for complicated real world videos, with challenges by real sensor noise, complex natural scenes, variations in illumination and depth, and motion discontinuities. The overall system demonstrates biological plausibility and holds great potential for other applications, such as camera motion removal, heading estimation, obstacle avoidance, route planning, and vision-based navigational assistance, etc

Discovering motion hierarchies via tree-structured coding of trajectories

International audienceThe dynamic content of physical scenes is largely compositional, that is, the movements of the objects and of their parts are hierarchically organised and relate through composition along this hierarchy. This structure also prevails in the apparent 2D motion that a video captures. Accessing this visual motion hierarchy is important to get a better understanding of dynamic scenes and is useful for video manipulation. We propose to capture it through learned, tree-structured sparse coding of point trajectories. We leverage this new representation within an unsupervised clustering scheme to partition hierarchically the trajectories into meaningful groups. We show through experiments on motion capture data that our model is able to extract moving segments along with their organisation. We also present competitive results on the task of segmenting objects in video sequences from trajectories