15,233 research outputs found
Contrast-Independent Biologically Inspired Motion Detection
Optic flow, i.e., retinal image movement resulting from ego-motion, is a crucial source of information used for obstacle avoidance and course control in flying insects. Optic flow analysis may prove promising for mobile robotics although it is currently not among the standard techniques. Insects have developed a computationally cheap analysis mechanism for image motion. Detailed computational models, the so-called elementary motion detectors (EMDs), describe motion detection in insects. However, the technical application of EMDs is complicated by the strong effect of local pattern contrast on their motion response. Here we present augmented versions of an EMD, the (s)cc-EMDs, which normalise their responses for contrast and thereby reduce the sensitivity to contrast changes. Thus, velocity changes of moving natural images are reflected more reliably in the detector response. The (s)cc-EMDs can easily be implemented in hardware and software and can be a valuable novel visual motion sensor for mobile robots
Event-based Vision: A Survey
Event cameras are bio-inspired sensors that differ from conventional frame
cameras: Instead of capturing images at a fixed rate, they asynchronously
measure per-pixel brightness changes, and output a stream of events that encode
the time, location and sign of the brightness changes. Event cameras offer
attractive properties compared to traditional cameras: high temporal resolution
(in the order of microseconds), very high dynamic range (140 dB vs. 60 dB), low
power consumption, and high pixel bandwidth (on the order of kHz) resulting in
reduced motion blur. Hence, event cameras have a large potential for robotics
and computer vision in challenging scenarios for traditional cameras, such as
low-latency, high speed, and high dynamic range. However, novel methods are
required to process the unconventional output of these sensors in order to
unlock their potential. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of the
emerging field of event-based vision, with a focus on the applications and the
algorithms developed to unlock the outstanding properties of event cameras. We
present event cameras from their working principle, the actual sensors that are
available and the tasks that they have been used for, from low-level vision
(feature detection and tracking, optic flow, etc.) to high-level vision
(reconstruction, segmentation, recognition). We also discuss the techniques
developed to process events, including learning-based techniques, as well as
specialized processors for these novel sensors, such as spiking neural
networks. Additionally, we highlight the challenges that remain to be tackled
and the opportunities that lie ahead in the search for a more efficient,
bio-inspired way for machines to perceive and interact with the world
Search Tracker: Human-derived object tracking in-the-wild through large-scale search and retrieval
Humans use context and scene knowledge to easily localize moving objects in
conditions of complex illumination changes, scene clutter and occlusions. In
this paper, we present a method to leverage human knowledge in the form of
annotated video libraries in a novel search and retrieval based setting to
track objects in unseen video sequences. For every video sequence, a document
that represents motion information is generated. Documents of the unseen video
are queried against the library at multiple scales to find videos with similar
motion characteristics. This provides us with coarse localization of objects in
the unseen video. We further adapt these retrieved object locations to the new
video using an efficient warping scheme. The proposed method is validated on
in-the-wild video surveillance datasets where we outperform state-of-the-art
appearance-based trackers. We also introduce a new challenging dataset with
complex object appearance changes.Comment: Under review with the IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for
Video Technolog
- …