127 research outputs found
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Sonic heritage: listening to the past
History is so often told through objects, images and photographs, but the potential of sounds to reveal place and space is often neglected. Our research project ‘Sonic Palimpsest’1 explores the potential of sound to evoke impressions and new understandings of the past, to embrace the sonic as a tool to understand what was, in a way that can complement and add to our predominant visual understandings. Our work includes the expansion of the Oral History archives held at Chatham Dockyard to include women’s voices and experiences, and the creation of sonic works to engage the public with their heritage. Our research highlights the social and cultural value of oral history and field recordings in the transmission of knowledge to both researchers and the public. Together these recordings document how buildings and spaces within the dockyard were used and experienced by those who worked there. We can begin to understand the social and cultural roles of these buildings within the community, both past and present
METROPOLITAN ENCHANTMENT AND DISENCHANTMENT. METROPOLITAN ANTHROPOLOGY FOR THE CONTEMPORARY LIVING MAP CONSTRUCTION
We can no longer interpret the contemporary metropolis as we did in the last century. The thought of civil economy regarding the contemporary Metropolis conflicts more or less radically with the merely acquisitive dimension of the behaviour of its citizens. What is needed is therefore a new capacity for
imagining the economic-productive future of the city: hybrid social enterprises, economically sustainable, structured and capable of using technologies, could be a solution for producing value and distributing it fairly and inclusively.
Metropolitan Urbanity is another issue to establish. Metropolis needs new spaces where inclusion can occur, and where a repository of the imagery can be recreated. What is the ontology behind the technique of metropolitan planning and management, its vision and its symbols? Competitiveness,
speed, and meritocracy are political words, not technical ones. Metropolitan Urbanity is the characteristic of a polis that expresses itself in its public places. Today, however, public places are private ones that are destined for public use. The Common Good has always had a space of representation in the city, which was the public space. Today, the Green-Grey Infrastructure is the metropolitan city's monument that communicates a value for future generations and must therefore be recognised and imagined; it is the production of the metropolitan symbolic imagery, the new magic of the city
Dense Visual Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping in Collaborative and Outdoor Scenarios
Dense visual simultaneous localisation and mapping (SLAM) systems can produce 3D
reconstructions that are digital facsimiles of the physical space they describe. Systems that
can produce dense maps with this level of fidelity in real time provide foundational spatial
reasoning capabilities for many downstream tasks in autonomous robotics. Over the past
15 years, mapping small scale, indoor environments, such as desks and buildings, with a
single slow moving, hand-held sensor has been one of the central focuses of dense visual
SLAM research.
However, most dense visual SLAM systems exhibit a number of limitations which
mean they cannot be directly applied in collaborative or outdoors settings. The contribution
of this thesis is to address these limitations with the development of new systems and
algorithms for collaborative dense mapping, efficient dense alternation and outdoors
operation with fast camera motion and wide field of view (FOV) cameras. We use
ElasticFusion, a state-of-the-art dense SLAM system, as our starting point where each of
these contributions is implemented as a novel extension to the system.
We first present a collaborative dense SLAM system that allows a number of
cameras starting with unknown initial relative positions to maintain local maps with the
original ElasticFusion algorithm. Visual place recognition across local maps results in
constraints that allow maps to be aligned into a common global reference frame, facilitating
collaborative mapping and tracking of multiple cameras within a shared map.
Within dense alternation based SLAM systems, the standard approach is to fuse
every frame into the dense model without considering whether the information contained
within the frame is already captured by the dense map and therefore redundant. As the
number of cameras or the scale of the map increases, this approach becomes inefficient. In
our second contribution, we address this inefficiency by introducing a novel information
theoretic approach to keyframe selection that allows the system to avoid processing
redundant information. We implement the procedure within ElasticFusion, demonstrating
a marked reduction in the number of frames required by the system to estimate an accurate,
denoised surface reconstruction.
Before dense SLAM techniques can be applied in outdoor scenarios we must
first address their reliance on active depth cameras, and their lack of suitability to fast
camera motion. In our third contribution we present an outdoor dense SLAM system. The system overcomes the need for an active sensor by employing neural network-based depth
inference to predict the geometry of the scene as it appears in each image. To address the
issue of camera tracking during fast motion we employ a hybrid architecture, combining
elements of both dense and sparse SLAM systems to perform camera tracking and to
achieve globally consistent dense mapping.
Automotive applications present a particularly important setting for dense visual
SLAM systems. Such applications are characterised by their use of wide FOV cameras and
are therefore not accurately modelled by the standard pinhole camera model. The fourth
contribution of this thesis is to extend the above hybrid sparse-dense monocular SLAM
system to cater for large FOV fisheye imagery. This is achieved by reformulating the
mapping pipeline in terms of the Kannala-Brandt fisheye camera model. To estimate depth,
we introduce a new version of the PackNet depth estimation neural network (Guizilini et
al., 2020) adapted for fisheye inputs.
To demonstrate the effectiveness of our contributions, we present experimental
results, computed by processing the synthetic ICL-NUIM dataset of Handa et al. (2014) as
well as the real-world TUM-RGBD dataset of Sturm et al. (2012). For outdoor SLAM we
show the results of our system processing the autonomous driving KITTI and KITTI-360
datasets of Geiger et al. (2012a) and Liao et al. (2021) respectively
RGB-D And Thermal Sensor Fusion: A Systematic Literature Review
In the last decade, the computer vision field has seen significant progress
in multimodal data fusion and learning, where multiple sensors, including
depth, infrared, and visual, are used to capture the environment across diverse
spectral ranges. Despite these advancements, there has been no systematic and
comprehensive evaluation of fusing RGB-D and thermal modalities to date. While
autonomous driving using LiDAR, radar, RGB, and other sensors has garnered
substantial research interest, along with the fusion of RGB and depth
modalities, the integration of thermal cameras and, specifically, the fusion of
RGB-D and thermal data, has received comparatively less attention. This might
be partly due to the limited number of publicly available datasets for such
applications. This paper provides a comprehensive review of both,
state-of-the-art and traditional methods used in fusing RGB-D and thermal
camera data for various applications, such as site inspection, human tracking,
fault detection, and others. The reviewed literature has been categorised into
technical areas, such as 3D reconstruction, segmentation, object detection,
available datasets, and other related topics. Following a brief introduction
and an overview of the methodology, the study delves into calibration and
registration techniques, then examines thermal visualisation and 3D
reconstruction, before discussing the application of classic feature-based
techniques as well as modern deep learning approaches. The paper concludes with
a discourse on current limitations and potential future research directions. It
is hoped that this survey will serve as a valuable reference for researchers
looking to familiarise themselves with the latest advancements and contribute
to the RGB-DT research field.Comment: 33 pages, 20 figure
Transforming our World through Universal Design for Human Development
An environment, or any building product or service in it, should ideally be designed to meet the needs of all those who wish to use it. Universal Design is the design and composition of environments, products, and services so that they can be accessed, understood and used to the greatest extent possible by all people, regardless of their age, size, ability or disability. It creates products, services and environments that meet people’s needs. In short, Universal Design is good design.
This book presents the proceedings of UD2022, the 6th International Conference on Universal Design, held from 7 - 9 September 2022 in Brescia, Italy.The conference is targeted at professionals and academics interested in the theme of universal design as related to the built environment and the wellbeing of users, but also covers mobility and urban environments, knowledge, and information transfer, bringing together research knowledge and best practice from all over the world. The book contains 72 papers from 13 countries, grouped into 8 sections and covering topics including the design of inclusive natural environments and urban spaces, communities, neighborhoods and cities; housing; healthcare; mobility and transport systems; and universally- designed learning environments, work places, cultural and recreational spaces. One section is devoted to universal design and cultural heritage, which had a particular focus at this edition of the conference.
The book reflects the professional and disciplinary diversity represented in the UD movement, and will be of interest to all those whose work involves inclusive design
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