Photometric Depth Super-Resolution

This study explores the use of photometric techniques (shape-from-shading and uncalibrated photometric stereo) for upsampling the low-resolution depth map from an RGB-D sensor to the higher resolution of the companion RGB image. A single-shot variational approach is first put forward, which is effective as long as the target's reflectance is piecewise-constant. It is then shown that this dependency upon a specific reflectance model can be relaxed by focusing on a specific class of objects (e.g., faces), and delegate reflectance estimation to a deep neural network. A multi-shot strategy based on randomly varying lighting conditions is eventually discussed. It requires no training or prior on the reflectance, yet this comes at the price of a dedicated acquisition setup. Both quantitative and qualitative evaluations illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods on synthetic and real-world scenarios.Comment: IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (T-PAMI), 2019. First three authors contribute equall

Depth Super-Resolution Meets Uncalibrated Photometric Stereo

A novel depth super-resolution approach for RGB-D sensors is presented. It disambiguates depth super-resolution through high-resolution photometric clues and, symmetrically, it disambiguates uncalibrated photometric stereo through low-resolution depth cues. To this end, an RGB-D sequence is acquired from the same viewing angle, while illuminating the scene from various uncalibrated directions. This sequence is handled by a variational framework which fits high-resolution shape and reflectance, as well as lighting, to both the low-resolution depth measurements and the high-resolution RGB ones. The key novelty consists in a new PDE-based photometric stereo regularizer which implicitly ensures surface regularity. This allows to carry out depth super-resolution in a purely data-driven manner, without the need for any ad-hoc prior or material calibration. Real-world experiments are carried out using an out-of-the-box RGB-D sensor and a hand-held LED light source.Comment: International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) Workshop, 201

Event Fusion Photometric Stereo Network

We present a novel method to estimate the surface normal of an object in an ambient light environment using RGB and event cameras. Modern photometric stereo methods rely on an RGB camera, mainly in a dark room, to avoid ambient illumination. To alleviate the limitations of the darkroom environment and to use essential light information, we employ an event camera with a high dynamic range and low latency. This is the first study that uses an event camera for the photometric stereo task, which works on continuous light sources and ambient light environment. In this work, we also curate a novel photometric stereo dataset that is constructed by capturing objects with event and RGB cameras under numerous ambient lights environment. Additionally, we propose a novel framework named Event Fusion Photometric Stereo Network~(EFPS-Net), which estimates the surface normals of an object using both RGB frames and event signals. Our proposed method interpolates event observation maps that generate light information with sparse event signals to acquire fluent light information. Subsequently, the event-interpolated observation maps are fused with the RGB observation maps. Our numerous experiments showed that EFPS-Net outperforms state-of-the-art methods on a dataset captured in the real world where ambient lights exist. Consequently, we demonstrate that incorporating additional modalities with EFPS-Net alleviates the limitations that occurred from ambient illumination.Comment: 33 pages, 11 figure

Artificial intelligence for advanced manufacturing quality

100 p.This Thesis addresses the challenge of AI-based image quality control systems applied to manufacturing industry, aiming to improve this field through the use of advanced techniques for data acquisition and processing, in order to obtain robust, reliable and optimal systems. This Thesis presents contributions onthe use of complex data acquisition techniques, the application and design of specialised neural networks for the defect detection, and the integration and validation of these systems in production processes. It has been developed in the context of several applied research projects that provided a practical feedback of the usefulness of the proposed computational advances as well as real life data for experimental validation