28,640 research outputs found
GASP : Geometric Association with Surface Patches
A fundamental challenge to sensory processing tasks in perception and
robotics is the problem of obtaining data associations across views. We present
a robust solution for ascertaining potentially dense surface patch (superpixel)
associations, requiring just range information. Our approach involves
decomposition of a view into regularized surface patches. We represent them as
sequences expressing geometry invariantly over their superpixel neighborhoods,
as uniquely consistent partial orderings. We match these representations
through an optimal sequence comparison metric based on the Damerau-Levenshtein
distance - enabling robust association with quadratic complexity (in contrast
to hitherto employed joint matching formulations which are NP-complete). The
approach is able to perform under wide baselines, heavy rotations, partial
overlaps, significant occlusions and sensor noise.
The technique does not require any priors -- motion or otherwise, and does
not make restrictive assumptions on scene structure and sensor movement. It
does not require appearance -- is hence more widely applicable than appearance
reliant methods, and invulnerable to related ambiguities such as textureless or
aliased content. We present promising qualitative and quantitative results
under diverse settings, along with comparatives with popular approaches based
on range as well as RGB-D data.Comment: International Conference on 3D Vision, 201
Optical techniques for 3D surface reconstruction in computer-assisted laparoscopic surgery
One of the main challenges for computer-assisted surgery (CAS) is to determine the intra-opera- tive morphology and motion of soft-tissues. This information is prerequisite to the registration of multi-modal patient-specific data for enhancing the surgeon’s navigation capabilites by observ- ing beyond exposed tissue surfaces and for providing intelligent control of robotic-assisted in- struments. In minimally invasive surgery (MIS), optical techniques are an increasingly attractive approach for in vivo 3D reconstruction of the soft-tissue surface geometry. This paper reviews the state-of-the-art methods for optical intra-operative 3D reconstruction in laparoscopic surgery and discusses the technical challenges and future perspectives towards clinical translation. With the recent paradigm shift of surgical practice towards MIS and new developments in 3D opti- cal imaging, this is a timely discussion about technologies that could facilitate complex CAS procedures in dynamic and deformable anatomical regions
3-D Hand Pose Estimation from Kinect's Point Cloud Using Appearance Matching
We present a novel appearance-based approach for pose estimation of a human
hand using the point clouds provided by the low-cost Microsoft Kinect sensor.
Both the free-hand case, in which the hand is isolated from the surrounding
environment, and the hand-object case, in which the different types of
interactions are classified, have been considered. The hand-object case is
clearly the most challenging task having to deal with multiple tracks. The
approach proposed here belongs to the class of partial pose estimation where
the estimated pose in a frame is used for the initialization of the next one.
The pose estimation is obtained by applying a modified version of the Iterative
Closest Point (ICP) algorithm to synthetic models to obtain the rigid
transformation that aligns each model with respect to the input data. The
proposed framework uses a "pure" point cloud as provided by the Kinect sensor
without any other information such as RGB values or normal vector components.
For this reason, the proposed method can also be applied to data obtained from
other types of depth sensor, or RGB-D camera
Robust Motion Segmentation from Pairwise Matches
In this paper we address a classification problem that has not been
considered before, namely motion segmentation given pairwise matches only. Our
contribution to this unexplored task is a novel formulation of motion
segmentation as a two-step process. First, motion segmentation is performed on
image pairs independently. Secondly, we combine independent pairwise
segmentation results in a robust way into the final globally consistent
segmentation. Our approach is inspired by the success of averaging methods. We
demonstrate in simulated as well as in real experiments that our method is very
effective in reducing the errors in the pairwise motion segmentation and can
cope with large number of mismatches
Computerized Analysis of Magnetic Resonance Images to Study Cerebral Anatomy in Developing Neonates
The study of cerebral anatomy in developing neonates is of great importance for
the understanding of brain development during the early period of life. This
dissertation therefore focuses on three challenges in the modelling of cerebral
anatomy in neonates during brain development. The methods that have been
developed all use Magnetic Resonance Images (MRI) as source data.
To facilitate study of vascular development in the neonatal period, a set of image
analysis algorithms are developed to automatically extract and model cerebral
vessel trees. The whole process consists of cerebral vessel tracking from
automatically placed seed points, vessel tree generation, and vasculature
registration and matching. These algorithms have been tested on clinical Time-of-
Flight (TOF) MR angiographic datasets.
To facilitate study of the neonatal cortex a complete cerebral cortex segmentation
and reconstruction pipeline has been developed. Segmentation of the neonatal
cortex is not effectively done by existing algorithms designed for the adult brain
because the contrast between grey and white matter is reversed. This causes pixels
containing tissue mixtures to be incorrectly labelled by conventional methods. The
neonatal cortical segmentation method that has been developed is based on a novel
expectation-maximization (EM) method with explicit correction for mislabelled
partial volume voxels. Based on the resulting cortical segmentation, an implicit
surface evolution technique is adopted for the reconstruction of the cortex in
neonates. The performance of the method is investigated by performing a detailed
landmark study.
To facilitate study of cortical development, a cortical surface registration algorithm
for aligning the cortical surface is developed. The method first inflates extracted
cortical surfaces and then performs a non-rigid surface registration using free-form
deformations (FFDs) to remove residual alignment. Validation experiments using
data labelled by an expert observer demonstrate that the method can capture local
changes and follow the growth of specific sulcus
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