Automated Complexity-Sensitive Image Fusion

To construct a complete representation of a scene with environmental obstacles such as fog, smoke, darkness, or textural homogeneity, multisensor video streams captured in diferent modalities are considered. A computational method for automatically fusing multimodal image streams into a highly informative and unified stream is proposed. The method consists of the following steps: 1. Image registration is performed to align video frames in the visible band over time, adapting to the nonplanarity of the scene by automatically subdividing the image domain into regions approximating planar patches 2. Wavelet coefficients are computed for each of the input frames in each modality 3. Corresponding regions and points are compared using spatial and temporal information across various scales 4. Decision rules based on the results of multimodal image analysis are used to combine thewavelet coefficients from different modalities 5. The combined wavelet coefficients are inverted to produce an output frame containing useful information gathered from the available modalities Experiments show that the proposed system is capable of producing fused output containing the characteristics of color visible-spectrum imagery while adding information exclusive to infrared imagery, with attractive visual and informational properties

Multimodal stereo from thermal infrared and visible spectrum

Recent advances in thermal infrared imaging (LWIR) has allowed its use in applications beyond of the military domain. Nowadays, this new family of sensors is included in different technical and scientific applications. They offer features that facilitate tasks, such as detection of pedestrians, hot spots, differences in temperature, among others, which can significantly improve the performance of a system where the persons are expected to play the principal role. For instance, video surveillance applications, monitoring, and pedestrian detection. During the dissertation the next question is stated: \textit{Could a couple of sensors measuring different bands of the electromagnetic spectrum, as the visible and thermal infrared, be used to extract depth information?} Although it is a complex question, we shows that a system of these characteristics is possible as well as their advantages, drawbacks, and potential opportunities. In this research an experimental study that compares different cost functions and matching approaches is performed, in order to build a multimodal stereovision system. Furthermore, the common problems in infrared/visible stereo, specially in the outdoor scenes are identified. Our framework summarizes the architecture of a generic stereo algorithm, at different levels: computational, functional, and structural, which can be extended toward high-level fusion (semantic) and high-order (prior). The proposed framework is intended to explore novel multimodal stereo matching approaches, going from sparse to dense representations (both disparity and depth maps). Moreover, context information is added in form of priors and assumptions. Finally, the dissertation shows a promissory way toward the integration of multiple sensors for recovering three-dimensional information

Improved depth recovery in consumer depth cameras via disparity space fusion within cross-spectral stereo.

We address the issue of improving depth coverage in consumer depth cameras based on the combined use of cross-spectral stereo and near infra-red structured light sensing. Specifically we show that fusion of disparity over these modalities, within the disparity space image, prior to disparity optimization facilitates the recovery of scene depth information in regions where structured light sensing fails. We show that this joint approach, leveraging disparity information from both structured light and cross-spectral sensing, facilitates the joint recovery of global scene depth comprising both texture-less object depth, where conventional stereo otherwise fails, and highly reflective object depth, where structured light (and similar) active sensing commonly fails. The proposed solution is illustrated using dense gradient feature matching and shown to outperform prior approaches that use late-stage fused cross-spectral stereo depth as a facet of improved sensing for consumer depth cameras

Box-level Segmentation Supervised Deep Neural Networks for Accurate and Real-time Multispectral Pedestrian Detection

Effective fusion of complementary information captured by multi-modal sensors (visible and infrared cameras) enables robust pedestrian detection under various surveillance situations (e.g. daytime and nighttime). In this paper, we present a novel box-level segmentation supervised learning framework for accurate and real-time multispectral pedestrian detection by incorporating features extracted in visible and infrared channels. Specifically, our method takes pairs of aligned visible and infrared images with easily obtained bounding box annotations as input and estimates accurate prediction maps to highlight the existence of pedestrians. It offers two major advantages over the existing anchor box based multispectral detection methods. Firstly, it overcomes the hyperparameter setting problem occurred during the training phase of anchor box based detectors and can obtain more accurate detection results, especially for small and occluded pedestrian instances. Secondly, it is capable of generating accurate detection results using small-size input images, leading to improvement of computational efficiency for real-time autonomous driving applications. Experimental results on KAIST multispectral dataset show that our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in terms of both accuracy and speed