26,354 research outputs found
Real-time architecture for robust motion estimation under varying illumination conditions
Motion estimation from image sequences is a complex problem which requires high computing resources and is highly affected by changes in the illumination conditions in most of the existing approaches. In this contribution we present a high performance system that deals with this limitation. Robustness to varying illumination conditions is achieved by a novel technique that combines a gradient-based optical flow method with a non-parametric image transformation based on the Rank transform. The paper describes this method and quantitatively evaluates its robustness to different illumination changing patterns. This technique has been successfully implemented in a real-time system using reconfigurable hardware. Our contribution presents the computing architecture, including the resources consumption and the obtained performance. The final system is a real-time device capable to computing motion sequences in real-time even in conditions with significant illumination changes. The robustness of the proposed system facilitates its use in multiple potential application fields.This work has been supported by the grants DEPROVI (DPI2004-07032), DRIVSCO (IST-016276-2) and TIC2007:”Plataforma Sw-Hw para sistemas de visión 3D en tiempo real”
How to Train a CAT: Learning Canonical Appearance Transformations for Direct Visual Localization Under Illumination Change
Direct visual localization has recently enjoyed a resurgence in popularity
with the increasing availability of cheap mobile computing power. The
competitive accuracy and robustness of these algorithms compared to
state-of-the-art feature-based methods, as well as their natural ability to
yield dense maps, makes them an appealing choice for a variety of mobile
robotics applications. However, direct methods remain brittle in the face of
appearance change due to their underlying assumption of photometric
consistency, which is commonly violated in practice. In this paper, we propose
to mitigate this problem by training deep convolutional encoder-decoder models
to transform images of a scene such that they correspond to a previously-seen
canonical appearance. We validate our method in multiple environments and
illumination conditions using high-fidelity synthetic RGB-D datasets, and
integrate the trained models into a direct visual localization pipeline,
yielding improvements in visual odometry (VO) accuracy through time-varying
illumination conditions, as well as improved metric relocalization performance
under illumination change, where conventional methods normally fail. We further
provide a preliminary investigation of transfer learning from synthetic to real
environments in a localization context. An open-source implementation of our
method using PyTorch is available at https://github.com/utiasSTARS/cat-net.Comment: In IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L) and presented at the
IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA'18), Brisbane,
Australia, May 21-25, 201
DistancePPG: Robust non-contact vital signs monitoring using a camera
Vital signs such as pulse rate and breathing rate are currently measured
using contact probes. But, non-contact methods for measuring vital signs are
desirable both in hospital settings (e.g. in NICU) and for ubiquitous in-situ
health tracking (e.g. on mobile phone and computers with webcams). Recently,
camera-based non-contact vital sign monitoring have been shown to be feasible.
However, camera-based vital sign monitoring is challenging for people with
darker skin tone, under low lighting conditions, and/or during movement of an
individual in front of the camera. In this paper, we propose distancePPG, a new
camera-based vital sign estimation algorithm which addresses these challenges.
DistancePPG proposes a new method of combining skin-color change signals from
different tracked regions of the face using a weighted average, where the
weights depend on the blood perfusion and incident light intensity in the
region, to improve the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of camera-based estimate.
One of our key contributions is a new automatic method for determining the
weights based only on the video recording of the subject. The gains in SNR of
camera-based PPG estimated using distancePPG translate into reduction of the
error in vital sign estimation, and thus expand the scope of camera-based vital
sign monitoring to potentially challenging scenarios. Further, a dataset will
be released, comprising of synchronized video recordings of face and pulse
oximeter based ground truth recordings from the earlobe for people with
different skin tones, under different lighting conditions and for various
motion scenarios.Comment: 24 pages, 11 figure
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