A fast and robust hand-driven 3D mouse

The development of new interaction paradigms requires a natural interaction. This means that people should be able to interact with technology with the same models used to interact with everyday real life, that is through gestures, expressions, voice. Following this idea, in this paper we propose a non intrusive vision based tracking system able to capture hand motion and simple hand gestures. The proposed device allows to use the hand as a "natural" 3D mouse, where the forefinger tip or the palm centre are used to identify a 3D marker and the hand gesture can be used to simulate the mouse buttons. The approach is based on a monoscopic tracking algorithm which is computationally fast and robust against noise and cluttered backgrounds. Two image streams are processed in parallel exploiting multi-core architectures, and their results are combined to obtain a constrained stereoscopic problem. The system has been implemented and thoroughly tested in an experimental environment where the 3D hand mouse has been used to interact with objects in a virtual reality application. We also provide results about the performances of the tracker, which demonstrate precision and robustness of the proposed syste

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

Indoor assistance for visually impaired people using a RGB-D camera

In this paper a navigational aid for visually impaired people is presented. The system uses a RGB-D camera to perceive the environment and implements self-localization, obstacle detection and obstacle classification. The novelty of this work is threefold. First, self-localization is performed by means of a novel camera tracking approach that uses both depth and color information. Second, to provide the user with semantic information, obstacles are classified as walls, doors, steps and a residual class that covers isolated objects and bumpy parts on the floor. Third, in order to guarantee real time performance, the system is accelerated by offloading parallel operations to the GPU. Experiments demonstrate that the whole system is running at 9 Hz

DART: Distribution Aware Retinal Transform for Event-based Cameras

We introduce a generic visual descriptor, termed as distribution aware retinal transform (DART), that encodes the structural context using log-polar grids for event cameras. The DART descriptor is applied to four different problems, namely object classification, tracking, detection and feature matching: (1) The DART features are directly employed as local descriptors in a bag-of-features classification framework and testing is carried out on four standard event-based object datasets (N-MNIST, MNIST-DVS, CIFAR10-DVS, NCaltech-101). (2) Extending the classification system, tracking is demonstrated using two key novelties: (i) For overcoming the low-sample problem for the one-shot learning of a binary classifier, statistical bootstrapping is leveraged with online learning; (ii) To achieve tracker robustness, the scale and rotation equivariance property of the DART descriptors is exploited for the one-shot learning. (3) To solve the long-term object tracking problem, an object detector is designed using the principle of cluster majority voting. The detection scheme is then combined with the tracker to result in a high intersection-over-union score with augmented ground truth annotations on the publicly available event camera dataset. (4) Finally, the event context encoded by DART greatly simplifies the feature correspondence problem, especially for spatio-temporal slices far apart in time, which has not been explicitly tackled in the event-based vision domain.Comment: 12 pages, revision submitted to TPAMI in Nov 201

Keyframe-based monocular SLAM: design, survey, and future directions

Extensive research in the field of monocular SLAM for the past fifteen years has yielded workable systems that found their way into various applications in robotics and augmented reality. Although filter-based monocular SLAM systems were common at some time, the more efficient keyframe-based solutions are becoming the de facto methodology for building a monocular SLAM system. The objective of this paper is threefold: first, the paper serves as a guideline for people seeking to design their own monocular SLAM according to specific environmental constraints. Second, it presents a survey that covers the various keyframe-based monocular SLAM systems in the literature, detailing the components of their implementation, and critically assessing the specific strategies made in each proposed solution. Third, the paper provides insight into the direction of future research in this field, to address the major limitations still facing monocular SLAM; namely, in the issues of illumination changes, initialization, highly dynamic motion, poorly textured scenes, repetitive textures, map maintenance, and failure recovery

Retinal ganglion cell software and FPGA model implementation for object detection and tracking

This paper describes the software and FPGA implementation of a Retinal Ganglion Cell model which detects moving objects. It is shown how this processing, in conjunction with a Dynamic Vision Sensor as its input, can be used to extrapolate information about object position. Software-wise, a system based on an array of these of RGCs has been developed in order to obtain up to two trackers. These can track objects in a scene, from a still observer, and get inhibited when saccadic camera motion happens. The entire processing takes on average 1000 ns/event. A simplified version of this mechanism, with a mean latency of 330 ns/event, at 50 MHz, has also been implemented in a Spartan6 FPGA.European Commission FP7-ICT-600954Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad TEC2012-37868-C04-02Junta de Andalucía P12-TIC-130

Traffic monitoring using image processing : a thesis presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Engineering in Information and Telecommunications Engineering at Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand

Traffic monitoring involves the collection of data describing the characteristics of vehicles and their movements. Such data may be used for automatic tolls, congestion and incident detection, law enforcement, and road capacity planning etc. With the recent advances in Computer Vision technology, videos can be analysed automatically and relevant information can be extracted for particular applications. Automatic surveillance using video cameras with image processing technique is becoming a powerful and useful technology for traffic monitoring. In this research project, a video image processing system that has the potential to be developed for real-time application is developed for traffic monitoring including vehicle tracking, counting, and classification. A heuristic approach is applied in developing this system. The system is divided into several parts, and several different functional components have been built and tested using some traffic video sequences. Evaluations are carried out to show that this system is robust and can be developed towards real-time applications