995 research outputs found
CoBe -- Coded Beacons for Localization, Object Tracking, and SLAM Augmentation
This paper presents a novel beacon light coding protocol, which enables fast
and accurate identification of the beacons in an image. The protocol is
provably robust to a predefined set of detection and decoding errors, and does
not require any synchronization between the beacons themselves and the optical
sensor. A detailed guide is then given for developing an optical tracking and
localization system, which is based on the suggested protocol and readily
available hardware. Such a system operates either as a standalone system for
recovering the six degrees of freedom of fast moving objects, or integrated
with existing SLAM pipelines providing them with error-free and easily
identifiable landmarks. Based on this guide, we implemented a low-cost
positional tracking system which can run in real-time on an IoT board. We
evaluate our system's accuracy and compare it to other popular methods which
utilize the same optical hardware, in experiments where the ground truth is
known. A companion video containing multiple real-world experiments
demonstrates the accuracy, speed, and applicability of the proposed system in a
wide range of environments and real-world tasks. Open source code is provided
to encourage further development of low-cost localization systems integrating
the suggested technology at its navigation core
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
Real-Time Panoramic Tracking for Event Cameras
Event cameras are a paradigm shift in camera technology. Instead of full
frames, the sensor captures a sparse set of events caused by intensity changes.
Since only the changes are transferred, those cameras are able to capture quick
movements of objects in the scene or of the camera itself. In this work we
propose a novel method to perform camera tracking of event cameras in a
panoramic setting with three degrees of freedom. We propose a direct camera
tracking formulation, similar to state-of-the-art in visual odometry. We show
that the minimal information needed for simultaneous tracking and mapping is
the spatial position of events, without using the appearance of the imaged
scene point. We verify the robustness to fast camera movements and dynamic
objects in the scene on a recently proposed dataset and self-recorded
sequences.Comment: Accepted to International Conference on Computational Photography
201
Correlation Flow: Robust Optical Flow Using Kernel Cross-Correlators
Robust velocity and position estimation is crucial for autonomous robot
navigation. The optical flow based methods for autonomous navigation have been
receiving increasing attentions in tandem with the development of micro
unmanned aerial vehicles. This paper proposes a kernel cross-correlator (KCC)
based algorithm to determine optical flow using a monocular camera, which is
named as correlation flow (CF). Correlation flow is able to provide reliable
and accurate velocity estimation and is robust to motion blur. In addition, it
can also estimate the altitude velocity and yaw rate, which are not available
by traditional methods. Autonomous flight tests on a quadcopter show that
correlation flow can provide robust trajectory estimation with very low
processing power. The source codes are released based on the ROS framework.Comment: 2018 International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2018
CED: Color Event Camera Dataset
Event cameras are novel, bio-inspired visual sensors, whose pixels output
asynchronous and independent timestamped spikes at local intensity changes,
called 'events'. Event cameras offer advantages over conventional frame-based
cameras in terms of latency, high dynamic range (HDR) and temporal resolution.
Until recently, event cameras have been limited to outputting events in the
intensity channel, however, recent advances have resulted in the development of
color event cameras, such as the Color-DAVIS346. In this work, we present and
release the first Color Event Camera Dataset (CED), containing 50 minutes of
footage with both color frames and events. CED features a wide variety of
indoor and outdoor scenes, which we hope will help drive forward event-based
vision research. We also present an extension of the event camera simulator
ESIM that enables simulation of color events. Finally, we present an evaluation
of three state-of-the-art image reconstruction methods that can be used to
convert the Color-DAVIS346 into a continuous-time, HDR, color video camera to
visualise the event stream, and for use in downstream vision applications.Comment: Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshop
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