11,706 research outputs found
PCA-RECT: An Energy-efficient Object Detection Approach for Event Cameras
We present the first purely event-based, energy-efficient approach for object
detection and categorization using an event camera. Compared to traditional
frame-based cameras, choosing event cameras results in high temporal resolution
(order of microseconds), low power consumption (few hundred mW) and wide
dynamic range (120 dB) as attractive properties. However, event-based object
recognition systems are far behind their frame-based counterparts in terms of
accuracy. To this end, this paper presents an event-based feature extraction
method devised by accumulating local activity across the image frame and then
applying principal component analysis (PCA) to the normalized neighborhood
region. Subsequently, we propose a backtracking-free k-d tree mechanism for
efficient feature matching by taking advantage of the low-dimensionality of the
feature representation. Additionally, the proposed k-d tree mechanism allows
for feature selection to obtain a lower-dimensional dictionary representation
when hardware resources are limited to implement dimensionality reduction.
Consequently, the proposed system can be realized on a field-programmable gate
array (FPGA) device leading to high performance over resource ratio. The
proposed system is tested on real-world event-based datasets for object
categorization, showing superior classification performance and relevance to
state-of-the-art algorithms. Additionally, we verified the object detection
method and real-time FPGA performance in lab settings under non-controlled
illumination conditions with limited training data and ground truth
annotations.Comment: Accepted in ACCV 2018 Workshops, to appea
Region of Interest Generation for Pedestrian Detection using Stereo Vision
Pedestrian detection is an active research area in the field of computer vision. The sliding window paradigm is usually followed to extract all possible detector windows, however, it is very time consuming. Subsequently, stereo vision using a pair of camera is preferred to reduce the search space that includes the depth information. Disparity map generation using feature correspondence is an integral part and a prior task to depth estimation. In our work, we apply the ORB features to fasten the feature correspondence process. Once the ROI generation phase is over, the extracted detector window is represented by low level histogram of oriented gradient (HOG) features. Subsequently, Linear Support Vector Machine (SVM) is applied to classify them as either pedestrian or non-pedestrian. The experimental results reveal that ORB driven depth estimation is at least seven times faster than the SURF descriptor and ten times faster than the SIFT descriptor
Attention and Anticipation in Fast Visual-Inertial Navigation
We study a Visual-Inertial Navigation (VIN) problem in which a robot needs to
estimate its state using an on-board camera and an inertial sensor, without any
prior knowledge of the external environment. We consider the case in which the
robot can allocate limited resources to VIN, due to tight computational
constraints. Therefore, we answer the following question: under limited
resources, what are the most relevant visual cues to maximize the performance
of visual-inertial navigation? Our approach has four key ingredients. First, it
is task-driven, in that the selection of the visual cues is guided by a metric
quantifying the VIN performance. Second, it exploits the notion of
anticipation, since it uses a simplified model for forward-simulation of robot
dynamics, predicting the utility of a set of visual cues over a future time
horizon. Third, it is efficient and easy to implement, since it leads to a
greedy algorithm for the selection of the most relevant visual cues. Fourth, it
provides formal performance guarantees: we leverage submodularity to prove that
the greedy selection cannot be far from the optimal (combinatorial) selection.
Simulations and real experiments on agile drones show that our approach ensures
state-of-the-art VIN performance while maintaining a lean processing time. In
the easy scenarios, our approach outperforms appearance-based feature selection
in terms of localization errors. In the most challenging scenarios, it enables
accurate visual-inertial navigation while appearance-based feature selection
fails to track robot's motion during aggressive maneuvers.Comment: 20 pages, 7 figures, 2 table
3D Robotic Sensing of People: Human Perception, Representation and Activity Recognition
The robots are coming. Their presence will eventually bridge the digital-physical divide and dramatically impact human life by taking over tasks where our current society has shortcomings (e.g., search and rescue, elderly care, and child education). Human-centered robotics (HCR) is a vision to address how robots can coexist with humans and help people live safer, simpler and more independent lives.
As humans, we have a remarkable ability to perceive the world around us, perceive people, and interpret their behaviors. Endowing robots with these critical capabilities in highly dynamic human social environments is a significant but very challenging problem in practical human-centered robotics applications.
This research focuses on robotic sensing of people, that is, how robots can perceive and represent humans and understand their behaviors, primarily through 3D robotic vision. In this dissertation, I begin with a broad perspective on human-centered robotics by discussing its real-world applications and significant challenges. Then, I will introduce a real-time perception system, based on the concept of Depth of Interest, to detect and track multiple individuals using a color-depth camera that is installed on moving robotic platforms. In addition, I will discuss human representation approaches, based on local spatio-temporal features, including new “CoDe4D” features that incorporate both color and depth information, a new “SOD” descriptor to efficiently quantize 3D visual features, and the novel AdHuC features, which are capable of representing the activities of multiple individuals. Several new algorithms to recognize human activities are also discussed, including the RG-PLSA model, which allows us to discover activity patterns without supervision, the MC-HCRF model, which can explicitly investigate certainty in latent temporal patterns, and the FuzzySR model, which is used to segment continuous data into events and probabilistically recognize human activities. Cognition models based on recognition results are also implemented for decision making that allow robotic systems to react to human activities. Finally, I will conclude with a discussion of future directions that will accelerate the upcoming technological revolution of human-centered robotics
Coarse-to-Fine Adaptive People Detection for Video Sequences by Maximizing Mutual Information
Applying people detectors to unseen data is challenging since patterns distributions, such
as viewpoints, motion, poses, backgrounds, occlusions and people sizes, may significantly differ
from the ones of the training dataset. In this paper, we propose a coarse-to-fine framework to adapt
frame by frame people detectors during runtime classification, without requiring any additional
manually labeled ground truth apart from the offline training of the detection model. Such adaptation
make use of multiple detectors mutual information, i.e., similarities and dissimilarities of detectors
estimated and agreed by pair-wise correlating their outputs. Globally, the proposed adaptation
discriminates between relevant instants in a video sequence, i.e., identifies the representative frames
for an adaptation of the system. Locally, the proposed adaptation identifies the best configuration
(i.e., detection threshold) of each detector under analysis, maximizing the mutual information to
obtain the detection threshold of each detector. The proposed coarse-to-fine approach does not
require training the detectors for each new scenario and uses standard people detector outputs, i.e.,
bounding boxes. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms
state-of-the-art detectors whose optimal threshold configurations are previously determined and
fixed from offline training dataThis work has been partially supported by the Spanish government under the project TEC2014-53176-R
(HAVideo
Spatial Pyramid Context-Aware Moving Object Detection and Tracking for Full Motion Video and Wide Aerial Motion Imagery
A robust and fast automatic moving object detection and tracking system is
essential to characterize target object and extract spatial and temporal
information for different functionalities including video surveillance systems,
urban traffic monitoring and navigation, robotic. In this dissertation, I
present a collaborative Spatial Pyramid Context-aware moving object detection
and Tracking system. The proposed visual tracker is composed of one master
tracker that usually relies on visual object features and two auxiliary
trackers based on object temporal motion information that will be called
dynamically to assist master tracker. SPCT utilizes image spatial context at
different level to make the video tracking system resistant to occlusion,
background noise and improve target localization accuracy and robustness. We
chose a pre-selected seven-channel complementary features including RGB color,
intensity and spatial pyramid of HoG to encode object color, shape and spatial
layout information. We exploit integral histogram as building block to meet the
demands of real-time performance. A novel fast algorithm is presented to
accurately evaluate spatially weighted local histograms in constant time
complexity using an extension of the integral histogram method. Different
techniques are explored to efficiently compute integral histogram on GPU
architecture and applied for fast spatio-temporal median computations and 3D
face reconstruction texturing. We proposed a multi-component framework based on
semantic fusion of motion information with projected building footprint map to
significantly reduce the false alarm rate in urban scenes with many tall
structures. The experiments on extensive VOTC2016 benchmark dataset and aerial
video confirm that combining complementary tracking cues in an intelligent
fusion framework enables persistent tracking for Full Motion Video and Wide
Aerial Motion Imagery.Comment: PhD Dissertation (162 pages
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