34,673 research outputs found
Enabling Depth-driven Visual Attention on the iCub Humanoid Robot: Instructions for Use and New Perspectives
The importance of depth perception in the interactions that humans have
within their nearby space is a well established fact. Consequently, it is also
well known that the possibility of exploiting good stereo information would
ease and, in many cases, enable, a large variety of attentional and interactive
behaviors on humanoid robotic platforms. However, the difficulty of computing
real-time and robust binocular disparity maps from moving stereo cameras often
prevents from relying on this kind of cue to visually guide robots' attention
and actions in real-world scenarios. The contribution of this paper is
two-fold: first, we show that the Efficient Large-scale Stereo Matching
algorithm (ELAS) by A. Geiger et al. 2010 for computation of the disparity map
is well suited to be used on a humanoid robotic platform as the iCub robot;
second, we show how, provided with a fast and reliable stereo system,
implementing relatively challenging visual behaviors in natural settings can
require much less effort. As a case of study we consider the common situation
where the robot is asked to focus the attention on one object close in the
scene, showing how a simple but effective disparity-based segmentation solves
the problem in this case. Indeed this example paves the way to a variety of
other similar applications
Video Registration in Egocentric Vision under Day and Night Illumination Changes
With the spread of wearable devices and head mounted cameras, a wide range of
application requiring precise user localization is now possible. In this paper
we propose to treat the problem of obtaining the user position with respect to
a known environment as a video registration problem. Video registration, i.e.
the task of aligning an input video sequence to a pre-built 3D model, relies on
a matching process of local keypoints extracted on the query sequence to a 3D
point cloud. The overall registration performance is strictly tied to the
actual quality of this 2D-3D matching, and can degrade if environmental
conditions such as steep changes in lighting like the ones between day and
night occur. To effectively register an egocentric video sequence under these
conditions, we propose to tackle the source of the problem: the matching
process. To overcome the shortcomings of standard matching techniques, we
introduce a novel embedding space that allows us to obtain robust matches by
jointly taking into account local descriptors, their spatial arrangement and
their temporal robustness. The proposal is evaluated using unconstrained
egocentric video sequences both in terms of matching quality and resulting
registration performance using different 3D models of historical landmarks. The
results show that the proposed method can outperform state of the art
registration algorithms, in particular when dealing with the challenges of
night and day sequences
Robust pedestrian detection and tracking in crowded scenes
In this paper, a robust computer vision approach to detecting and tracking pedestrians in unconstrained crowded scenes is presented. Pedestrian detection is performed via a 3D clustering process within a region-growing framework. The clustering process avoids using hard thresholds by using bio-metrically inspired constraints and a number of plan view statistics. Pedestrian tracking is achieved by formulating the track matching process as a weighted bipartite graph and using a Weighted Maximum Cardinality Matching scheme. The approach is evaluated using both indoor and outdoor sequences, captured using a variety of different camera placements and orientations, that feature significant challenges in terms of the number of pedestrians present, their interactions and scene lighting conditions. The evaluation is performed against a manually generated groundtruth for all sequences. Results point to the extremely accurate performance of the proposed approach in all cases
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
- …