8,903 research outputs found
High Performance Issues in Image Processing and Computer Vision
Typical image processing and computer vision tasks found in industrial, medical, and military applications require real-time solutions. These requirements have motivated the design of many parallel architectures and algorithms. Recently, a new architecture called the reconfigurable mesh has been proposed. This thesis addresses a number of problems in image processing and computer vision on reconfigurable meshes.
We first show that a number of low-level descriptors of a digitized image such as the perimeter, area, histogram and median row can be reduced to computing the sum of all the integers in a matrix, which in turn can be reduced to computing the prefix sums of a binary sequence and the prefix sums of an integer sequence. We then propose a new computational paradigm for reconfigurable meshes, that is, identifying an entity by a bus and performing computations on the bus to obtain properties of the entity. Using the new paradigm, we solve a number of mid-level vision tasks including the Hough transform and component labeling. Finally, a VLSI-optimal constant time algorithm for computing the convex hull of a set of planar points is presented based on a VLSI-optimal constant time sorting algorithm.
As by-products, two basic data movement techniques, computing the prefix sums of a binary sequence and computing the prefix maxima of a sequence of real numbers, and a VLSI-optimal constant time sorting algorithm have been developed. These by-products are interesting in their own right. In addition, they can be exploited to obtain efficient algorithms for a number of computational problems
Massively Parallel Computing and the Search for Jets and Black Holes at the LHC
Massively parallel computing at the LHC could be the next leap necessary to
reach an era of new discoveries at the LHC after the Higgs discovery.
Scientific computing is a critical component of the LHC experiment, including
operation, trigger, LHC computing GRID, simulation, and analysis. One way to
improve the physics reach of the LHC is to take advantage of the flexibility of
the trigger system by integrating coprocessors based on Graphics Processing
Units (GPUs) or the Many Integrated Core (MIC) architecture into its server
farm. This cutting edge technology provides not only the means to accelerate
existing algorithms, but also the opportunity to develop new algorithms that
select events in the trigger that previously would have evaded detection. In
this article we describe new algorithms that would allow to select in the
trigger new topological signatures that include non-prompt jet and black
hole--like objects in the silicon tracker.Comment: 15 pages, 11 figures, submitted to NIM
Connectivity-Enforcing Hough Transform for the Robust Extraction of Line Segments
Global voting schemes based on the Hough transform (HT) have been widely used
to robustly detect lines in images. However, since the votes do not take line
connectivity into account, these methods do not deal well with cluttered
images. In opposition, the so-called local methods enforce connectivity but
lack robustness to deal with challenging situations that occur in many
realistic scenarios, e.g., when line segments cross or when long segments are
corrupted. In this paper, we address the critical limitations of the HT as a
line segment extractor by incorporating connectivity in the voting process.
This is done by only accounting for the contributions of edge points lying in
increasingly larger neighborhoods and whose position and directional content
agree with potential line segments. As a result, our method, which we call
STRAIGHT (Segment exTRAction by connectivity-enforcInG HT), extracts the
longest connected segments in each location of the image, thus also integrating
into the HT voting process the usually separate step of individual segment
extraction. The usage of the Hough space mapping and a corresponding
hierarchical implementation make our approach computationally feasible. We
present experiments that illustrate, with synthetic and real images, how
STRAIGHT succeeds in extracting complete segments in several situations where
current methods fail.Comment: Submitted for publicatio
Robot navigation control based on monocular images: An image processing algorithm for obstacle avoidance decisions
This paper covers the use of monocular vision to control autonomous navigation for a robot in a dynamically changing environment. The solution focused on using colour segmentation against a selected floor plane to distinctly separate obstacles from traversable space, this is then supplemented with canny edge detection to separate similarly coloured boundaries to the floor plane. The resulting binary map (where white identifies an obstacle-free area and black identifies an obstacle) could then be processed by fuzzy logic or neural networks to control the robot’s next movements. Findings shows that the algorithm performed strongly on solid coloured carpets, wooden and concrete floors but had difficulty in separating colours in multi-coloured floor types such as patterned carpets
Automated Generation of Geometric Theorems from Images of Diagrams
We propose an approach to generate geometric theorems from electronic images
of diagrams automatically. The approach makes use of techniques of Hough
transform to recognize geometric objects and their labels and of numeric
verification to mine basic geometric relations. Candidate propositions are
generated from the retrieved information by using six strategies and geometric
theorems are obtained from the candidates via algebraic computation.
Experiments with a preliminary implementation illustrate the effectiveness and
efficiency of the proposed approach for generating nontrivial theorems from
images of diagrams. This work demonstrates the feasibility of automated
discovery of profound geometric knowledge from simple image data and has
potential applications in geometric knowledge management and education.Comment: 31 pages. Submitted to Annals of Mathematics and Artificial
Intelligence (special issue on Geometric Reasoning
Ship Wake Detection in SAR Images via Sparse Regularization
In order to analyse synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images of the sea surface,
ship wake detection is essential for extracting information on the wake
generating vessels. One possibility is to assume a linear model for wakes, in
which case detection approaches are based on transforms such as Radon and
Hough. These express the bright (dark) lines as peak (trough) points in the
transform domain. In this paper, ship wake detection is posed as an inverse
problem, which the associated cost function including a sparsity enforcing
penalty, i.e. the generalized minimax concave (GMC) function. Despite being a
non-convex regularizer, the GMC penalty enforces the overall cost function to
be convex. The proposed solution is based on a Bayesian formulation, whereby
the point estimates are recovered using maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimation.
To quantify the performance of the proposed method, various types of SAR images
are used, corresponding to TerraSAR-X, COSMO-SkyMed, Sentinel-1, and ALOS2. The
performance of various priors in solving the proposed inverse problem is first
studied by investigating the GMC along with the L1, Lp, nuclear and total
variation (TV) norms. We show that the GMC achieves the best results and we
subsequently study the merits of the corresponding method in comparison to two
state-of-the-art approaches for ship wake detection. The results show that our
proposed technique offers the best performance by achieving 80% success rate.Comment: 18 page
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