Surface networks

© Copyright CASA, UCL. The desire to understand and exploit the structure of continuous surfaces is common to researchers in a range of disciplines. Few examples of the varied surfaces forming an integral part of modern subjects include terrain, population density, surface atmospheric pressure, physico-chemical surfaces, computer graphics, and metrological surfaces. The focus of the work here is a group of data structures called Surface Networks, which abstract 2-dimensional surfaces by storing only the most important (also called fundamental, critical or surface-specific) points and lines in the surfaces. Surface networks are intelligent and “natural ” data structures because they store a surface as a framework of “surface ” elements unlike the DEM or TIN data structures. This report presents an overview of the previous works and the ideas being developed by the authors of this report. The research on surface networks has fou

A system for synthetic vision and augmented reality in future flight decks

Rockwell Science Center is investigating novel human-computer interaction techniques for enhancing the situational awareness in future flight decks. One aspect is to provide intuitive displays that provide the vital information and the spatial awareness by augmenting the real world with an overlay of relevant information registered to the real world. Such Augmented Reality (AR) techniques can be employed during bad weather scenarios to permit flying in Visual Flight Rules (VFR) in conditions which would normally require Instrumental Flight Rules (IFR). These systems could easily be implemented on heads-up displays (HUD). The advantage of AR systems vs. purely synthetic vision (SV) systems is that the pilot can relate the information overlay to real objects in the world, whereas SV systems provide a constant virtual view, where inconsistencies can hardly be detected. The development of components for such a system led to a demonstrator implemented on a PC. A camera grabs video images which are overlaid with registered information. Orientation of the camera is obtained from an inclinometer and a magnetometer; position is acquired from GPS. In a possible implementation in an airplane, the on-board attitude information can be used for obtaining correct registration. If visibility is sufficient, computer vision modules can be used to fine-tune the registration by matching visual cues with database features. This technology would be especially useful for landing approaches. The current demonstrator provides a frame-rate of 15 fps, using a live video feed as background with an overlay of avionics symbology in the foreground. In addition, terrain rendering from a 1 arc sec. digital elevation model database can be overlaid to provide synthetic vision in case of limited visibility. For true outdoor testing (on ground level), the system has been implemented on a wearable computer

Building Fuzzy Elevation Maps from a Ground-based 3D Laser Scan for Outdoor Mobile Robots

Mandow, A; Cantador, T.J.; Reina, A.J.; Martínez, J.L.; Morales, J.; García-Cerezo, A. "Building Fuzzy Elevation Maps from a Ground-based 3D Laser Scan for Outdoor Mobile Robots," Robot2015: Second Iberian Robotics Conference, Advances in Robotics, (2016) Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol. 418. This is a self-archiving copy of the author’s accepted manuscript. The final publication is available at Springer via http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-319-27149-1.The paper addresses terrain modeling for mobile robots with fuzzy elevation maps by improving computational speed and performance over previous work on fuzzy terrain identification from a three-dimensional (3D) scan. To this end, spherical sub-sampling of the raw scan is proposed to select training data that does not filter out salient obstacles. Besides, rule structure is systematically defined by considering triangular sets with an unevenly distributed standard fuzzy partition and zero order Sugeno-type consequents. This structure, which favors a faster training time and reduces the number of rule parameters, also serves to compute a fuzzy reliability mask for the continuous fuzzy surface. The paper offers a case study using a Hokuyo-based 3D rangefinder to model terrain with and without outstanding obstacles. Performance regarding error and model size is compared favorably with respect to a solution that uses quadric-based surface simplification (QSlim).This work was partially supported by the Spanish CICYT project DPI 2011-22443, the Andalusian project PE-2010 TEP-6101, and Universidad de Málaga-Andalucía Tech

Estimating snow cover from publicly available images

In this paper we study the problem of estimating snow cover in mountainous regions, that is, the spatial extent of the earth surface covered by snow. We argue that publicly available visual content, in the form of user generated photographs and image feeds from outdoor webcams, can both be leveraged as additional measurement sources, complementing existing ground, satellite and airborne sensor data. To this end, we describe two content acquisition and processing pipelines that are tailored to such sources, addressing the specific challenges posed by each of them, e.g., identifying the mountain peaks, filtering out images taken in bad weather conditions, handling varying illumination conditions. The final outcome is summarized in a snow cover index, which indicates for a specific mountain and day of the year, the fraction of visible area covered by snow, possibly at different elevations. We created a manually labelled dataset to assess the accuracy of the image snow covered area estimation, achieving 90.0% precision at 91.1% recall. In addition, we show that seasonal trends related to air temperature are captured by the snow cover index.Comment: submitted to IEEE Transactions on Multimedi

Visibility studies in archaeology: a review and case study

This paper describes the history and current state of archaeological visibility studies. The first part is a survey of both GIS (geographic information systems) and non-GIS studies of visibility by archaeologists, which demonstrates how advances in GIS visibility studies have tended to recapitulate, albeit over a compressed timescale, theoretically driven developments in non-GIS studies. The second part presents an example of the kind of methodological development required for the use of GIS to contribute to the agenda set by certain strands of a more humanistic archaeology. An algorithm developed to retrieve various summaries of the inclination at which points on the horizon are visible from a specified viewpoint was applied to nineteen recumbent stone circles in the Grampian region of Scotland. The results suggest that these summaries provide a useful tool for 'unpacking' what archaeologists mean when they claim that the topographic setting of certain stone circles creates an 'impression of circularity'

Night sky brightness at sites from DMSP-OLS satellite measurements

We apply the sky brightness modelling technique introduced and developed by Roy Garstang to high-resolution DMSP-OLS satellite measurements of upward artificial light flux and to GTOPO30 digital elevation data in order to predict the brightness distribution of the night sky at a given site in the primary astronomical photometric bands for a range of atmospheric aerosol contents. This method, based on global data and accounting for elevation, Earth curvature and mountain screening, allows the evaluation of sky glow conditions over the entire sky for any site in the World, to evaluate its evolution, to disentangle the contribution of individual sources in the surrounding territory, and to identify main contributing sources. Sky brightness, naked eye stellar visibility and telescope limiting magnitude are produced as 3-dimensional arrays whose axes are the position on the sky and the atmospheric clarity. We compared our results to available measurements.Comment: 14 pages, 12 figures, accepted for publication in MNRAS, 17 june 200

Query-by-Pointing: Algorithms and Pointing Error Compensation

People typically communicate by pointing, talking, sketching, writing, and typing. Pointing can be used to visualize or exchange information about an object when there is no other mutually understood way of communication. Despite its proven expressiveness, however, it has not yet become a frequently used modality to interact with computer systems. With the rapid move towards the adoption of mobile technologies, geographic information systems (GISs) have a particular need for advanced forms of interaction that enable users to query the geographic world directly. To enable pointing-based query system on a handheld device, a number of fundamental technical challenges have to be overcome. For such a system to materialize we need models stored in the device\u27s knowledge base that can be used as surrogate of real world objects. These computations, however, assume that (1) the pointing direction matches with the line-of-sight and (2) the observations about location and direction are precise enough so that a computational model will determine the same object as what the user points at. Both assumptions are not true. This thesis, therefore, develops an efficient error compensation model to reduce the discrepancy between the line-of-sight of the eye and the pointer direction. The model is based on a coordinate system centered at the neck and distances measured from neck to eye, neck to shoulder, shoulder to handheld pointer, and the pointing direction. An experiment was conducted using a gyro-enhanced sensor and three subjects who pointed at marked targets in a given room. It showed that the error compensation algorithm significantly reduces errors in pointing with arms outstretched