Computational intelligence approaches to robotics, automation, and control [Volume guest editors]

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Miniaturized embedded stereo vision system (MESVS)

Stereo vision is one of the fundamental problems of computer vision. It is also one of the oldest and heavily investigated areas of 3D vision. Recent advances of stereo matching methodologies and availability of high performance and efficient algorithms along with availability of fast and affordable hardware technology, have allowed researchers to develop several stereo vision systems capable of operating at real-time. Although a multitude of such systems exist in the literature, the majority of them concentrates only on raw performance and quality rather than factors such as dimension, and power requirement, which are of significant importance in the embedded settings. In this thesis a new miniaturized embedded stereo vision system (MESVS) is presented, which is miniaturized to fit within a package of 5x5cm, is power efficient, and cost-effective. Furthermore, through application of embedded programming techniques and careful optimization, MESVS achieves the real-time performance of 20 frames per second. This work discusses the various challenges involved regarding design and implementation of this system and the measures taken to tackle them

An Optimal Time-Space Algorithm for Dense Stereo Matching

An original survey addressing time-space complexity covers several stereo matching algorithms and running time experiments are reported. Taking the point of view that good reconstruction needs to be solved in feedback loops, we then present a new dense stereo matching based on a path computation in disparity space. A procedure which improves disparity maps is also introduced as a post-processing step for any technique solving a dense stereo matching problem. Compared to other algorithms, our algorithm has optimal time-space complexity. The algorithm is faster than "real-time" techniques while producing comparable results. The correctness of our algorithm is demonstrated by experiments in real and synthetic benchmark data

Better Foreground Segmentation Through Graph Cuts

For many tracking and surveillance applications, background subtraction provides an effective means of segmenting objects moving in front of a static background. Researchers have traditionally used combinations of morphological operations to remove the noise inherent in the background-subtracted result. Such techniques can effectively isolate foreground objects, but tend to lose fidelity around the borders of the segmentation, especially for noisy input. This paper explores the use of a minimum graph cut algorithm to segment the foreground, resulting in qualitatively and quantitiatively cleaner segmentations. Experiments on both artificial and real data show that the graph-based method reduces the error around segmented foreground objects. A MATLAB code implementation is available at http://www.cs.smith.edu/~nhowe/research/code/#fgsegComment: 8 pages, 110 figures. Revision: Added web link to downloadable Matlab implementatio

3D RECONSTRUCTION FROM STEREO/RANGE IMAGES

3D reconstruction from stereo/range image is one of the most fundamental and extensively researched topics in computer vision. Stereo research has recently experienced somewhat of a new era, as a result of publically available performance testing such as the Middlebury data set, which has allowed researchers to compare their algorithms against all the state-of-the-art algorithms. This thesis investigates into the general stereo problems in both the two-view stereo and multi-view stereo scopes. In the two-view stereo scope, we formulate an algorithm for the stereo matching problem with careful handling of disparity, discontinuity and occlusion. The algorithm works with a global matching stereo model based on an energy minimization framework. The experimental results are evaluated on the Middlebury data set, showing that our algorithm is the top performer. A GPU approach of the Hierarchical BP algorithm is then proposed, which provides similar stereo quality to CPU Hierarchical BP while running at real-time speed. A fast-converging BP is also proposed to solve the slow convergence problem of general BP algorithms. Besides two-view stereo, ecient multi-view stereo for large scale urban reconstruction is carefully studied in this thesis. A novel approach for computing depth maps given urban imagery where often large parts of surfaces are weakly textured is presented. Finally, a new post-processing step to enhance the range images in both the both the spatial resolution and depth precision is proposed