2,427 research outputs found
Event-based Vision: A Survey
Event cameras are bio-inspired sensors that differ from conventional frame
cameras: Instead of capturing images at a fixed rate, they asynchronously
measure per-pixel brightness changes, and output a stream of events that encode
the time, location and sign of the brightness changes. Event cameras offer
attractive properties compared to traditional cameras: high temporal resolution
(in the order of microseconds), very high dynamic range (140 dB vs. 60 dB), low
power consumption, and high pixel bandwidth (on the order of kHz) resulting in
reduced motion blur. Hence, event cameras have a large potential for robotics
and computer vision in challenging scenarios for traditional cameras, such as
low-latency, high speed, and high dynamic range. However, novel methods are
required to process the unconventional output of these sensors in order to
unlock their potential. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of the
emerging field of event-based vision, with a focus on the applications and the
algorithms developed to unlock the outstanding properties of event cameras. We
present event cameras from their working principle, the actual sensors that are
available and the tasks that they have been used for, from low-level vision
(feature detection and tracking, optic flow, etc.) to high-level vision
(reconstruction, segmentation, recognition). We also discuss the techniques
developed to process events, including learning-based techniques, as well as
specialized processors for these novel sensors, such as spiking neural
networks. Additionally, we highlight the challenges that remain to be tackled
and the opportunities that lie ahead in the search for a more efficient,
bio-inspired way for machines to perceive and interact with the world
Photometric Depth Super-Resolution
This study explores the use of photometric techniques (shape-from-shading and
uncalibrated photometric stereo) for upsampling the low-resolution depth map
from an RGB-D sensor to the higher resolution of the companion RGB image. A
single-shot variational approach is first put forward, which is effective as
long as the target's reflectance is piecewise-constant. It is then shown that
this dependency upon a specific reflectance model can be relaxed by focusing on
a specific class of objects (e.g., faces), and delegate reflectance estimation
to a deep neural network. A multi-shot strategy based on randomly varying
lighting conditions is eventually discussed. It requires no training or prior
on the reflectance, yet this comes at the price of a dedicated acquisition
setup. Both quantitative and qualitative evaluations illustrate the
effectiveness of the proposed methods on synthetic and real-world scenarios.Comment: IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence
(T-PAMI), 2019. First three authors contribute equall
Linear Differential Constraints for Photo-polarimetric Height Estimation
In this paper we present a differential approach to photo-polarimetric shape
estimation. We propose several alternative differential constraints based on
polarisation and photometric shading information and show how to express them
in a unified partial differential system. Our method uses the image ratios
technique to combine shading and polarisation information in order to directly
reconstruct surface height, without first computing surface normal vectors.
Moreover, we are able to remove the non-linearities so that the problem reduces
to solving a linear differential problem. We also introduce a new method for
estimating a polarisation image from multichannel data and, finally, we show it
is possible to estimate the illumination directions in a two source setup,
extending the method into an uncalibrated scenario. From a numerical point of
view, we use a least-squares formulation of the discrete version of the
problem. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to consider a
unified differential approach to solve photo-polarimetric shape estimation
directly for height. Numerical results on synthetic and real-world data confirm
the effectiveness of our proposed method.Comment: To appear at International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV),
Venice, Italy, October 22-29, 201
A Variational Stereo Method for the Three-Dimensional Reconstruction of Ocean Waves
We develop a novel remote sensing technique for the observation of waves on the ocean surface. Our method infers the 3-D waveform and radiance of oceanic sea states via a variational stereo imagery formulation. In this setting, the shape and radiance of the wave surface are given by minimizers of a composite energy functional that combines a photometric matching term along with regularization terms involving the smoothness of the unknowns. The desired ocean surface shape and radiance are the solution of a system of coupled partial differential equations derived from the optimality conditions of the energy functional. The proposed method is naturally extended to study the spatiotemporal dynamics of ocean waves and applied to three sets of stereo video data. Statistical and spectral analysis are carried out. Our results provide evidence that the observed omnidirectional wavenumber spectrum S(k) decays as k-2.5 is in agreement with Zakharov's theory (1999). Furthermore, the 3-D spectrum of the reconstructed wave surface is exploited to estimate wave dispersion and currents
Single-image RGB Photometric Stereo With Spatially-varying Albedo
We present a single-shot system to recover surface geometry of objects with
spatially-varying albedos, from images captured under a calibrated RGB
photometric stereo setup---with three light directions multiplexed across
different color channels in the observed RGB image. Since the problem is
ill-posed point-wise, we assume that the albedo map can be modeled as
piece-wise constant with a restricted number of distinct albedo values. We show
that under ideal conditions, the shape of a non-degenerate local constant
albedo surface patch can theoretically be recovered exactly. Moreover, we
present a practical and efficient algorithm that uses this model to robustly
recover shape from real images. Our method first reasons about shape locally in
a dense set of patches in the observed image, producing shape distributions for
every patch. These local distributions are then combined to produce a single
consistent surface normal map. We demonstrate the efficacy of the approach
through experiments on both synthetic renderings as well as real captured
images.Comment: 3DV 2016. Project page at http://www.ttic.edu/chakrabarti/rgbps
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