15,309 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
X-ray Isophote Shapes and the Mass of NGC 3923
We present analysis of the shape and radial mass distribution of the E4
galaxy NGC 3923 using archival X-ray data from the ROSAT PSPC and HRI. The
X-ray isophotes are significantly elongated with ellipticity e_x=0.15
(0.09-0.21) (90% confidence) for semi-major axis a\sim 10h^{-1}_70 kpc and have
position angles aligned with the optical isophotes within the estimated
uncertainties. Applying the Geometric Test for dark matter, which is
independent of the gas temperature profile, we find that the ellipticities of
the PSPC isophotes exceed those predicted if M propto L at a marginal
significance level of 85% (80%) for oblate (prolate) symmetry. Detailed
hydrostatic models of an isothermal gas yield ellipticities for the gravitating
matter, e_mass=0.35-0.66 (90% confidence), which exceed the intensity weighted
ellipticity of the R-band optical light, = 0.30 (e_R^max=0.39).
We conclude that mass density profiles with rho\sim r^{-2} are favored over
steeper profiles if the gas is essentially isothermal (which is suggested by
the PSPC spectrum) and the surface brightness in the central regions (r<~15")
is not modified substantially by a multi-phase cooling flow, magnetic fields,
or discrete sources. We argue that these effects are unlikely to be important
for NGC 3923. (The derived e_{mass} range is very insensitive to these issues.)
Our spatial analysis also indicates that the allowed contribution to the ROSAT
emission from a population of discrete sources with Sigma_x propto Sigma_R is
significantly less than that indicated by the hard spectral component measured
by ASCA.Comment: 14 pages (6 figures), To Appear in MNRA
Multi-Scale 3D Scene Flow from Binocular Stereo Sequences
Scene flow methods estimate the three-dimensional motion field for points in the world, using multi-camera video data. Such methods combine multi-view reconstruction with motion estimation. This paper describes an alternative formulation for dense scene flow estimation that provides reliable results using only two cameras by fusing stereo and optical flow estimation into a single coherent framework. Internally, the proposed algorithm generates probability distributions for optical flow and disparity. Taking into account the uncertainty in the intermediate stages allows for more reliable estimation of the 3D scene flow than previous methods allow. To handle the aperture problems inherent in the estimation of optical flow and disparity, a multi-scale method along with a novel region-based technique is used within a regularized solution. This combined approach both preserves discontinuities and prevents over-regularization – two problems commonly associated with the basic multi-scale approaches. Experiments with synthetic and real test data demonstrate the strength of the proposed approach.National Science Foundation (CNS-0202067, IIS-0208876); Office of Naval Research (N00014-03-1-0108
Sparse optical flow regularisation for real-time visual tracking
Optical flow can greatly improve the robustness of visual tracking algorithms. While dense optical flow algorithms have various applications, they can not be used for real-time solutions without resorting to GPU calculations. Furthermore, most optical flow algorithms fail in challenging lighting environments due to the violation of the brightness constraint. We propose a simple but effective iterative regularisation scheme for real-time, sparse optical flow algorithms, that is shown to be robust to sudden illumination changes and can handle large displacements. The algorithm proves to outperform well known techniques in real life video sequences, while being much faster to calculate. Our solution increases the robustness of a real-time particle filter based tracking application, consuming only a fraction of the available CPU power. Furthermore, a new and realistic optical flow dataset with annotated ground truth is created and made freely available for research purposes
Unsupervised Deep Epipolar Flow for Stationary or Dynamic Scenes
Unsupervised deep learning for optical flow computation has achieved
promising results. Most existing deep-net based methods rely on image
brightness consistency and local smoothness constraint to train the networks.
Their performance degrades at regions where repetitive textures or occlusions
occur. In this paper, we propose Deep Epipolar Flow, an unsupervised optical
flow method which incorporates global geometric constraints into network
learning. In particular, we investigate multiple ways of enforcing the epipolar
constraint in flow estimation. To alleviate a "chicken-and-egg" type of problem
encountered in dynamic scenes where multiple motions may be present, we propose
a low-rank constraint as well as a union-of-subspaces constraint for training.
Experimental results on various benchmarking datasets show that our method
achieves competitive performance compared with supervised methods and
outperforms state-of-the-art unsupervised deep-learning methods.Comment: CVPR 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
Disparity and Optical Flow Partitioning Using Extended Potts Priors
This paper addresses the problems of disparity and optical flow partitioning
based on the brightness invariance assumption. We investigate new variational
approaches to these problems with Potts priors and possibly box constraints.
For the optical flow partitioning, our model includes vector-valued data and an
adapted Potts regularizer. Using the notation of asymptotically level stable
functions we prove the existence of global minimizers of our functionals. We
propose a modified alternating direction method of minimizers. This iterative
algorithm requires the computation of global minimizers of classical univariate
Potts problems which can be done efficiently by dynamic programming. We prove
that the algorithm converges both for the constrained and unconstrained
problems. Numerical examples demonstrate the very good performance of our
partitioning method
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