23,520 research outputs found
Addressing environmental and atmospheric challenges for capturing high-precision thermal infrared data in the field of astro-ecology
Using thermal infrared detectors mounted on drones, and applying techniques
from astrophysics, we hope to support the field of conservation ecology by
creating an automated pipeline for the detection and identification of certain
endangered species and poachers from thermal infrared data. We test part of our
system by attempting to detect simulated poachers in the field. Whilst we find
that we can detect humans hiding in the field in some types of terrain, we also
find several environmental factors that prevent accurate detection, such as
ambient heat from the ground, absorption of infrared emission by the
atmosphere, obscuring vegetation and spurious sources from the terrain. We
discuss the effect of these issues, and potential solutions which will be
required for our future vision for a fully automated drone-based global
conservation monitoring system.Comment: Published in Proceedings of SPIE Astronomical Telescopes and
Instrumentation 2018. 8 pages, 3 figure
Polar Fusion Technique Analysis for Evaluating the Performances of Image Fusion of Thermal and Visual Images for Human Face Recognition
This paper presents a comparative study of two different methods, which are
based on fusion and polar transformation of visual and thermal images. Here,
investigation is done to handle the challenges of face recognition, which
include pose variations, changes in facial expression, partial occlusions,
variations in illumination, rotation through different angles, change in scale
etc. To overcome these obstacles we have implemented and thoroughly examined
two different fusion techniques through rigorous experimentation. In the first
method log-polar transformation is applied to the fused images obtained after
fusion of visual and thermal images whereas in second method fusion is applied
on log-polar transformed individual visual and thermal images. After this step,
which is thus obtained in one form or another, Principal Component Analysis
(PCA) is applied to reduce dimension of the fused images. Log-polar transformed
images are capable of handling complicacies introduced by scaling and rotation.
The main objective of employing fusion is to produce a fused image that
provides more detailed and reliable information, which is capable to overcome
the drawbacks present in the individual visual and thermal face images.
Finally, those reduced fused images are classified using a multilayer
perceptron neural network. The database used for the experiments conducted here
is Object Tracking and Classification Beyond Visible Spectrum (OTCBVS) database
benchmark thermal and visual face images. The second method has shown better
performance, which is 95.71% (maximum) and on an average 93.81% as correct
recognition rate.Comment: Proceedings of IEEE Workshop on Computational Intelligence in
Biometrics and Identity Management (IEEE CIBIM 2011), Paris, France, April 11
- 15, 201
Borrow from Anywhere: Pseudo Multi-modal Object Detection in Thermal Imagery
Can we improve detection in the thermal domain by borrowing features from
rich domains like visual RGB? In this paper, we propose a pseudo-multimodal
object detector trained on natural image domain data to help improve the
performance of object detection in thermal images. We assume access to a
large-scale dataset in the visual RGB domain and relatively smaller dataset (in
terms of instances) in the thermal domain, as is common today. We propose the
use of well-known image-to-image translation frameworks to generate pseudo-RGB
equivalents of a given thermal image and then use a multi-modal architecture
for object detection in the thermal image. We show that our framework
outperforms existing benchmarks without the explicit need for paired training
examples from the two domains. We also show that our framework has the ability
to learn with less data from thermal domain when using our approach. Our code
and pre-trained models are made available at
https://github.com/tdchaitanya/MMTODComment: Accepted at Perception Beyond Visible Spectrum Workshop, CVPR 201
Adapting astronomical source detection software to help detect animals in thermal images obtained by unmanned aerial systems
In this paper we describe an unmanned aerial system equipped with a thermal-infrared camera and software pipeline that we have developed to monitor animal populations for conservation purposes. Taking a multi-disciplinary approach to tackle this problem, we use freely available astronomical source detection software and the associated expertise of astronomers, to efficiently and reliably detect humans and animals in aerial thermal-infrared footage. Combining this astronomical detection software with existing machine learning algorithms into a single, automated, end-to-end pipeline, we test the software using aerial video footage taken in a controlled, field-like environment. We demonstrate that the pipeline works reliably and describe how it can be used to estimate the completeness of different observational datasets to objects of a given type as a function of height, observing conditions etc. - a crucial step in converting video footage to scientifically useful information such as the spatial distribution and density of different animal species. Finally, having demonstrated the potential utility of the system, we describe the steps we are taking to adapt the system for work in the field, in particular systematic monitoring of endangered species at National Parks around the world
A bank of unscented Kalman filters for multimodal human perception with mobile service robots
A new generation of mobile service robots could be ready soon to operate in human environments if they can robustly estimate position and identity of surrounding people. Researchers in this field face a number of challenging problems, among which sensor uncertainties and real-time constraints.
In this paper, we propose a novel and efficient solution for simultaneous tracking and recognition of people within the observation range of a mobile robot. Multisensor techniques for legs and face detection are fused in a robust probabilistic framework to height, clothes and face recognition algorithms. The system is based on an efficient bank of Unscented Kalman Filters that keeps a multi-hypothesis estimate of the person being tracked, including the case where the latter is unknown to the robot.
Several experiments with real mobile robots are presented to validate the proposed approach. They show that our solutions can improve the robot's perception and recognition of humans, providing a useful contribution for the future application of service robotics
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