Multi-camera 3-D tracking using particle filter

Determining the 3D location of a moving object, and tracking it from a sequence of different camera images is a classical but still challenging problem. In our approach neither explicit triangulation, nor precise motion model are used; only the colour of the object to be tracked is required. We use a particle filter, where the observation model we have developed avoids the colour filtering of the entire image. Preliminary experiments are presented and lessons learned are commented. The approach easily scales to several cameras and new sensor cue

Block-synchronous Harmonic Control for Scalable Trajectory Planning

ISBN : 978-953-7619-20-6Trajectory planning consists in finding a way to get from a starting position to a goal position while avoiding obstacles within a given environment or navigation space. Harmonic functions may be used as potential fields for trajectory planning. Such functions do not have local extrema, so that control algorithms may reduce to locally descend the potential field until reaching a minimum, when obstacles correspond to maxima of the potential and goals correspond to minima. This chapter presents a parallel hardware implementation of this navigation method on reconfigurable digital circuits. Trajectories are estimated after the iterated computation of the harmonic function, given the goal and obstacle positions of the navigation problem. The proposed massively distributed implementation locally computes the direction to choose to get to the goal position at any point of the environment. Changes in this environment may be immediately taken into account, for example when obstacles are discovered during an on-line exploration. To fit real-world applications, our implementation has been designed to deal with very large navigation environments while optimizing computation time