Visual Servoing

The goal of this book is to introduce the visional application by excellent researchers in the world currently and offer the knowledge that can also be applied to another field widely. This book collects the main studies about machine vision currently in the world, and has a powerful persuasion in the applications employed in the machine vision. The contents, which demonstrate that the machine vision theory, are realized in different field. For the beginner, it is easy to understand the development in the vision servoing. For engineer, professor and researcher, they can study and learn the chapters, and then employ another application method

Geo-tagging and privacy-preservation in mobile cloud computing

With the emerge of the cloud computing service and the explosive growth of the mobile devices and applications, mobile computing technologies and cloud computing technologies have been drawing significant attentions. Mobile cloud computing, with the synergy between the cloud and mobile technologies, has brought us new opportunities to develop novel and practical systems such as mobile multimedia systems and cloud systems that provide collaborative data-mining services for data from disparate owners (e.g., mobile users). However, it also creates new challenges, e.g., the algorithms deployed in the computationally weak mobile device require higher efficiency, and introduces new problems such as the privacy concern when the private data is shared in the cloud for collaborative data-mining. The main objectives of this dissertation are: 1. to develop practical systems based on the unique features of mobile devices (i.e., all-in-one computing platform and sensors) and the powerful computing capability of the cloud; 2. to propose solutions protecting the data privacy when the data from disparate owners are shared in the cloud for collaborative data-mining. We first propose a mobile geo-tagging system. It is a novel, accurate and efficient image and video based remote target localization and tracking system using the Android smartphone. To cope with the smartphones' computational limitation, we design light-weight image/video processing algorithms to achieve a good balance between estimation accuracy and computational complexity. Our system is first of its kind and we provide first hand real-world experimental results, which demonstrate that our system is feasible and practicable. To address the privacy concern when data from disparate owners are shared in the cloud for collaborative data-mining, we then propose a generic compressive sensing (CS) based secure multiparty computation (MPC) framework for privacy-preserving collaborative data-mining in which data mining is performed in the CS domain. We perform the CS transformation and reconstruction processes with MPC protocols. We modify the original orthogonal matching pursuit algorithm and develop new MPC protocols so that the CS reconstruction process can be implemented using MPC. Our analysis and experimental results show that our generic framework is capable of enabling privacy preserving collaborative data-mining. The proposed framework can be applied to many privacy preserving collaborative data-mining and signal processing applications in the cloud. We identify an application scenario that requires simultaneously performing secure watermark detection and privacy preserving multimedia data storage. We further propose a privacy preserving storage and secure watermark detection framework by adopting our generic framework to address such a requirement. In our secure watermark detection framework, the multimedia data and secret watermark pattern are presented to the cloud for secure watermark detection in a compressive sensing domain to protect the privacy. We also give mathematical and statistical analysis to derive the expected watermark detection performance in the compressive sensing domain, based on the target image, watermark pattern and the size of the compressive sensing matrix (but without the actual CS matrix), which means that the watermark detection performance in the CS domain can be estimated during the watermark embedding process. The correctness of the derived performance has been validated by our experiments. Our theoretical analysis and experimental results show that secure watermark detection in the compressive sensing domain is feasible. By taking advantage of our mobile geo-tagging system and compressive sensing based privacy preserving data-mining framework, we develop a mobile privacy preserving collaborative filtering system. In our system, mobile users can share their personal data with each other in the cloud and get daily activity recommendations based on the data-mining results generated by the cloud, without leaking the privacy and secrecy of the data to other parties. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed system is effective in enabling efficient mobile privacy preserving collaborative filtering services.Includes bibliographical references (pages 126-133)

Action Recognition in Videos: from Motion Capture Labs to the Web

This paper presents a survey of human action recognition approaches based on visual data recorded from a single video camera. We propose an organizing framework which puts in evidence the evolution of the area, with techniques moving from heavily constrained motion capture scenarios towards more challenging, realistic, "in the wild" videos. The proposed organization is based on the representation used as input for the recognition task, emphasizing the hypothesis assumed and thus, the constraints imposed on the type of video that each technique is able to address. Expliciting the hypothesis and constraints makes the framework particularly useful to select a method, given an application. Another advantage of the proposed organization is that it allows categorizing newest approaches seamlessly with traditional ones, while providing an insightful perspective of the evolution of the action recognition task up to now. That perspective is the basis for the discussion in the end of the paper, where we also present the main open issues in the area.Comment: Preprint submitted to CVIU, survey paper, 46 pages, 2 figures, 4 table

Fast 3D cluster tracking for a mobile robot using 2D techniques on depth images

User simultaneous detection and tracking is an issue at the core of human-robot interaction (HRI). Several methods exist and give good results; many use image processing techniques on images provided by the camera. The increasing presence in mobile robots of range-imaging cameras (such as structured light devices as Microsoft Kinects) allows us to develop image processing on depth maps. In this article, a fast and lightweight algorithm is presented for the detection and tracking of 3D clusters thanks to classic 2D techniques such as edge detection and connected components applied to the depth maps. The recognition of clusters is made using their 2D shape. An algorithm for the compression of depth maps has been specifically developed, allowing the distribution of the whole processing among several computers. The algorithm is then applied to a mobile robot for chasing an object selected by the user. The algorithm is coupled with laser-based tracking to make up for the narrow field of view of the range-imaging camera. The workload created by the method is light enough to enable its use even with processors with limited capabilities. Extensive experimental results are given for verifying the usefulness of the proposed method.Spanish MICINN (Ministry of Science and Innovation) through the project ‘‘Applications of Social Robots=Aplicaciones de los Robots Sociales.’’Publicad