Efficient Image-Space Extraction and Representation of 3D Surface Topography

Surface topography refers to the geometric micro-structure of a surface and defines its tactile characteristics (typically in the sub-millimeter range). High-resolution 3D scanning techniques developed recently enable the 3D reconstruction of surfaces including their surface topography. In his paper, we present an efficient image-space technique for the extraction of surface topography from high-resolution 3D reconstructions. Additionally, we filter noise and enhance topographic attributes to obtain an improved representation for subsequent topography classification. Comprehensive experiments show that the our representation captures well topographic attributes and significantly improves classification performance compared to alternative 2D and 3D representations.Comment: Initial version of the paper accepted at the IEEE ICIP Conference 201

Structured Light-Based 3D Reconstruction System for Plants.

Camera-based 3D reconstruction of physical objects is one of the most popular computer vision trends in recent years. Many systems have been built to model different real-world subjects, but there is lack of a completely robust system for plants. This paper presents a full 3D reconstruction system that incorporates both hardware structures (including the proposed structured light system to enhance textures on object surfaces) and software algorithms (including the proposed 3D point cloud registration and plant feature measurement). This paper demonstrates the ability to produce 3D models of whole plants created from multiple pairs of stereo images taken at different viewing angles, without the need to destructively cut away any parts of a plant. The ability to accurately predict phenotyping features, such as the number of leaves, plant height, leaf size and internode distances, is also demonstrated. Experimental results show that, for plants having a range of leaf sizes and a distance between leaves appropriate for the hardware design, the algorithms successfully predict phenotyping features in the target crops, with a recall of 0.97 and a precision of 0.89 for leaf detection and less than a 13-mm error for plant size, leaf size and internode distance

Data-Driven Grasp Synthesis - A Survey

We review the work on data-driven grasp synthesis and the methodologies for sampling and ranking candidate grasps. We divide the approaches into three groups based on whether they synthesize grasps for known, familiar or unknown objects. This structure allows us to identify common object representations and perceptual processes that facilitate the employed data-driven grasp synthesis technique. In the case of known objects, we concentrate on the approaches that are based on object recognition and pose estimation. In the case of familiar objects, the techniques use some form of a similarity matching to a set of previously encountered objects. Finally for the approaches dealing with unknown objects, the core part is the extraction of specific features that are indicative of good grasps. Our survey provides an overview of the different methodologies and discusses open problems in the area of robot grasping. We also draw a parallel to the classical approaches that rely on analytic formulations.Comment: 20 pages, 30 Figures, submitted to IEEE Transactions on Robotic

Gabor Barcodes for Medical Image Retrieval

In recent years, advances in medical imaging have led to the emergence of massive databases, containing images from a diverse range of modalities. This has significantly heightened the need for automated annotation of the images on one side, and fast and memory-efficient content-based image retrieval systems on the other side. Binary descriptors have recently gained more attention as a potential vehicle to achieve these goals. One of the recently introduced binary descriptors for tagging of medical images are Radon barcodes (RBCs) that are driven from Radon transform via local thresholding. Gabor transform is also a powerful transform to extract texture-based information. Gabor features have exhibited robustness against rotation, scale, and also photometric disturbances, such as illumination changes and image noise in many applications. This paper introduces Gabor Barcodes (GBCs), as a novel framework for the image annotation. To find the most discriminative GBC for a given query image, the effects of employing Gabor filters with different parameters, i.e., different sets of scales and orientations, are investigated, resulting in different barcode lengths and retrieval performances. The proposed method has been evaluated on the IRMA dataset with 193 classes comprising of 12,677 x-ray images for indexing, and 1,733 x-rays images for testing. A total error score as low as $351$ ($\approx 80\%$ accuracy for the first hit) was achieved.Comment: To appear in proceedings of The 2016 IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP 2016), Sep 25-28, 2016, Phoenix, Arizona, US