3D Modeling of Objects by Using Resilient Neural Network

Camera Calibration (CC) is a fundamental issue for Shape-Capture, Robotic-Vision and 3D Reconstruction in Photogrammetry and Computer Vision. The purpose of CC is the determination of the intrinsic parameters of cameras for metric evaluation of the images. Classical CC methods comprise of taking images of objects with known geometry, extracting the features of the objects from the images, and minimizing their 3D backprojection errors. In this paper, a novel implicit-CC model (CC-RN) based on Resilient Neural Networks has been introduced. The CC-RN is particularly useful for 3D reconstruction of the applications that do not require explicitly computation of physical camera parameters in addition to the expert knowledge. The CC-RN supports intelligent-photogrammetry, photogrammetron. In order to evaluate the success of the proposed implicit-CC model, the 3D reconstruction performance of the CC-RN has been compared with two different well-known implementations of the Direct Linear Transformation (DLT). Extensive simulation results show that the CC-RN achieves a better performance than the well-known DLTs in the 3D backprojection of scene

Past, Present, and Future of Simultaneous Localization And Mapping: Towards the Robust-Perception Age

Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM)consists in the concurrent construction of a model of the environment (the map), and the estimation of the state of the robot moving within it. The SLAM community has made astonishing progress over the last 30 years, enabling large-scale real-world applications, and witnessing a steady transition of this technology to industry. We survey the current state of SLAM. We start by presenting what is now the de-facto standard formulation for SLAM. We then review related work, covering a broad set of topics including robustness and scalability in long-term mapping, metric and semantic representations for mapping, theoretical performance guarantees, active SLAM and exploration, and other new frontiers. This paper simultaneously serves as a position paper and tutorial to those who are users of SLAM. By looking at the published research with a critical eye, we delineate open challenges and new research issues, that still deserve careful scientific investigation. The paper also contains the authors' take on two questions that often animate discussions during robotics conferences: Do robots need SLAM? and Is SLAM solved

Implicit sensing of building occupancy count with information and communication technology data sets

Occupancy count, i.e., the number of people in a space or building, is becoming an increasingly important measurement to model, predict, and minimize operational energy consumption. Explicit, hardware-based, occupancy counters have been proposed but wide scale adoption is limited due to the cost and invasiveness of system implementation. As an alternative approach, researchers propose using data from existing information and communication technology (ICT) systems to infer occupancy counts. In the reported work, three different data streams, security access data, wireless connectivity data, and computer activity data, from ICT systems in a medium sized office building were collected and compared to the counts of a commercially available occupancy counter over 59 working days. The occupancy counts from the ICT systems are compared to the commercial counter with and without calibration to determine the ability of the data sets to measure occupancy. Various transformations were explored as calibration techniques for the ICT data sets. Training sets of 24, 48, and 120 hours were employed to determine how long an external calibration system would need to be installed. The analysis found that calibration is required to provide accurate counts. While each ICT data set provides similar magnitudes and time series behavior, incorporating all three data streams in a two layer neural network with 1 week of training data provides the most accurate estimates against 5 performance metrics. Whilst 1 week of data provides the best results, 24 hours is sufficient to develop similar levels of performance

Applied Mathematics and Computational Physics

As faster and more efficient numerical algorithms become available, the understanding of the physics and the mathematical foundation behind these new methods will play an increasingly important role. This Special Issue provides a platform for researchers from both academia and industry to present their novel computational methods that have engineering and physics applications

Development of soft computing and applications in agricultural and biological engineering

Soft computing is a set of “inexact” computing techniques, which are able to model and analyze very complex problems. For these complex problems, more conventional methods have not been able to produce cost-effective, analytical, or complete solutions. Soft computing has been extensively studied and applied in the last three decades for scientific research and engineering computing. In agricultural and biological engineering, researchers and engineers have developed methods of fuzzy logic, artificial neural networks, genetic algorithms, decision trees, and support vector machines to study soil and water regimes related to crop growth, analyze the operation of food processing, and support decision-making in precision farming. This paper reviews the development of soft computing techniques. With the concepts and methods, applications of soft computing in the field of agricultural and biological engineering are presented, especially in the soil and water context for crop management and decision support in precision agriculture. The future of development and application of soft computing in agricultural and biological engineering is discussed