General Dynamic Scene Reconstruction from Multiple View Video

This paper introduces a general approach to dynamic scene reconstruction from multiple moving cameras without prior knowledge or limiting constraints on the scene structure, appearance, or illumination. Existing techniques for dynamic scene reconstruction from multiple wide-baseline camera views primarily focus on accurate reconstruction in controlled environments, where the cameras are fixed and calibrated and background is known. These approaches are not robust for general dynamic scenes captured with sparse moving cameras. Previous approaches for outdoor dynamic scene reconstruction assume prior knowledge of the static background appearance and structure. The primary contributions of this paper are twofold: an automatic method for initial coarse dynamic scene segmentation and reconstruction without prior knowledge of background appearance or structure; and a general robust approach for joint segmentation refinement and dense reconstruction of dynamic scenes from multiple wide-baseline static or moving cameras. Evaluation is performed on a variety of indoor and outdoor scenes with cluttered backgrounds and multiple dynamic non-rigid objects such as people. Comparison with state-of-the-art approaches demonstrates improved accuracy in both multiple view segmentation and dense reconstruction. The proposed approach also eliminates the requirement for prior knowledge of scene structure and appearance

Optical Synoptic Telescopes: New Science Frontiers

Over the past decade, sky surveys such as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey have proven the power of large data sets for answering fundamental astrophysical questions. This observational progress, based on a synergy of advances in telescope construction, detectors, and information technology, has had a dramatic impact on nearly all fields of astronomy, and areas of fundamental physics. The next-generation instruments, and the surveys that will be made with them, will maintain this revolutionary progress. The hardware and computational technical challenges and the exciting science opportunities are attracting scientists and engineers from astronomy, optics, low-light-level detectors, high-energy physics, statistics, and computer science. The history of astronomy has taught us repeatedly that there are surprises whenever we view the sky in a new way. This will be particularly true of discoveries emerging from a new generation of sky surveys. Imaging data from large ground-based active optics telescopes with sufficient etendue can address many scientific missions simultaneously. These new investigations will rely on the statistical precision obtainable with billions of objects. For the first time, the full sky will be surveyed deep and fast, opening a new window on a universe of faint moving and distant exploding objects as well as unraveling the mystery of dark energy.Comment: 12 pages, 7 figure

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

A framework for realistic 3D tele-immersion

Meeting, socializing and conversing online with a group of people using teleconferencing systems is still quite differ- ent from the experience of meeting face to face. We are abruptly aware that we are online and that the people we are engaging with are not in close proximity. Analogous to how talking on the telephone does not replicate the experi- ence of talking in person. Several causes for these differences have been identified and we propose inspiring and innova- tive solutions to these hurdles in attempt to provide a more realistic, believable and engaging online conversational expe- rience. We present the distributed and scalable framework REVERIE that provides a balanced mix of these solutions. Applications build on top of the REVERIE framework will be able to provide interactive, immersive, photo-realistic ex- periences to a multitude of users that for them will feel much more similar to having face to face meetings than the expe- rience offered by conventional teleconferencing systems

RGB-D datasets using microsoft kinect or similar sensors: a survey

RGB-D data has turned out to be a very useful representation of an indoor scene for solving fundamental computer vision problems. It takes the advantages of the color image that provides appearance information of an object and also the depth image that is immune to the variations in color, illumination, rotation angle and scale. With the invention of the low-cost Microsoft Kinect sensor, which was initially used for gaming and later became a popular device for computer vision, high quality RGB-D data can be acquired easily. In recent years, more and more RGB-D image/video datasets dedicated to various applications have become available, which are of great importance to benchmark the state-of-the-art. In this paper, we systematically survey popular RGB-D datasets for different applications including object recognition, scene classification, hand gesture recognition, 3D-simultaneous localization and mapping, and pose estimation. We provide the insights into the characteristics of each important dataset, and compare the popularity and the difficulty of those datasets. Overall, the main goal of this survey is to give a comprehensive description about the available RGB-D datasets and thus to guide researchers in the selection of suitable datasets for evaluating their algorithms

Creating Simplified 3D Models with High Quality Textures

This paper presents an extension to the KinectFusion algorithm which allows creating simplified 3D models with high quality RGB textures. This is achieved through (i) creating model textures using images from an HD RGB camera that is calibrated with Kinect depth camera, (ii) using a modified scheme to update model textures in an asymmetrical colour volume that contains a higher number of voxels than that of the geometry volume, (iii) simplifying dense polygon mesh model using quadric-based mesh decimation algorithm, and (iv) creating and mapping 2D textures to every polygon in the output 3D model. The proposed method is implemented in real-time by means of GPU parallel processing. Visualization via ray casting of both geometry and colour volumes provides users with a real-time feedback of the currently scanned 3D model. Experimental results show that the proposed method is capable of keeping the model texture quality even for a heavily decimated model and that, when reconstructing small objects, photorealistic RGB textures can still be reconstructed.Comment: 2015 International Conference on Digital Image Computing: Techniques and Applications (DICTA), Page 1 -