1,347 research outputs found
Acceleration of stereo-matching on multi-core CPU and GPU
This paper presents an accelerated version of a
dense stereo-correspondence algorithm for two different parallelism
enabled architectures, multi-core CPU and GPU. The
algorithm is part of the vision system developed for a binocular
robot-head in the context of the CloPeMa 1 research project.
This research project focuses on the conception of a new clothes
folding robot with real-time and high resolution requirements
for the vision system. The performance analysis shows that
the parallelised stereo-matching algorithm has been significantly
accelerated, maintaining 12x and 176x speed-up respectively
for multi-core CPU and GPU, compared with non-SIMD singlethread
CPU. To analyse the origin of the speed-up and gain
deeper understanding about the choice of the optimal hardware,
the algorithm was broken into key sub-tasks and the performance
was tested for four different hardware architectures
Guided Filtering based Pyramidal Stereo Matching for Unrectified Images
Stereo matching deals with recovering quantitative
depth information from a set of input images, based on the visual
disparity between corresponding points. Generally most of the
algorithms assume that the processed images are rectified. As
robotics becomes popular, conducting stereo matching in the
context of cloth manipulation, such as obtaining the disparity
map of the garments from the two cameras of the cloth folding
robot, is useful and challenging. This is resulted from the fact of
the high efficiency, accuracy and low memory requirement under
the usage of high resolution images in order to capture the details
(e.g. cloth wrinkles) for the given application (e.g. cloth folding).
Meanwhile, the images can be unrectified. Therefore, we propose
to adapt guided filtering algorithm into the pyramidical stereo
matching framework that works directly for unrectified images.
To evaluate the proposed unrectified stereo matching in terms of
accuracy, we present three datasets that are suited to especially
the characteristics of the task of cloth manipulations. By com-
paring the proposed algorithm with two baseline algorithms on
those three datasets, we demonstrate that our proposed approach
is accurate, efficient and requires low memory. This also shows
that rather than relying on image rectification, directly applying
stereo matching through the unrectified images can be also quite
effective and meanwhile efficien
Quick and energy-efficient Bayesian computing of binocular disparity using stochastic digital signals
Reconstruction of the tridimensional geometry of a visual scene using the
binocular disparity information is an important issue in computer vision and
mobile robotics, which can be formulated as a Bayesian inference problem.
However, computation of the full disparity distribution with an advanced
Bayesian model is usually an intractable problem, and proves computationally
challenging even with a simple model. In this paper, we show how probabilistic
hardware using distributed memory and alternate representation of data as
stochastic bitstreams can solve that problem with high performance and energy
efficiency. We put forward a way to express discrete probability distributions
using stochastic data representations and perform Bayesian fusion using those
representations, and show how that approach can be applied to diparity
computation. We evaluate the system using a simulated stochastic implementation
and discuss possible hardware implementations of such architectures and their
potential for sensorimotor processing and robotics.Comment: Preprint of article submitted for publication in International
Journal of Approximate Reasoning and accepted pending minor revision
Deep Eyes: Binocular Depth-from-Focus on Focal Stack Pairs
Human visual system relies on both binocular stereo cues and monocular
focusness cues to gain effective 3D perception. In computer vision, the two
problems are traditionally solved in separate tracks. In this paper, we present
a unified learning-based technique that simultaneously uses both types of cues
for depth inference. Specifically, we use a pair of focal stacks as input to
emulate human perception. We first construct a comprehensive focal stack
training dataset synthesized by depth-guided light field rendering. We then
construct three individual networks: a Focus-Net to extract depth from a single
focal stack, a EDoF-Net to obtain the extended depth of field (EDoF) image from
the focal stack, and a Stereo-Net to conduct stereo matching. We show how to
integrate them into a unified BDfF-Net to obtain high-quality depth maps.
Comprehensive experiments show that our approach outperforms the
state-of-the-art in both accuracy and speed and effectively emulates human
vision systems
Fast Multi-frame Stereo Scene Flow with Motion Segmentation
We propose a new multi-frame method for efficiently computing scene flow
(dense depth and optical flow) and camera ego-motion for a dynamic scene
observed from a moving stereo camera rig. Our technique also segments out
moving objects from the rigid scene. In our method, we first estimate the
disparity map and the 6-DOF camera motion using stereo matching and visual
odometry. We then identify regions inconsistent with the estimated camera
motion and compute per-pixel optical flow only at these regions. This flow
proposal is fused with the camera motion-based flow proposal using fusion moves
to obtain the final optical flow and motion segmentation. This unified
framework benefits all four tasks - stereo, optical flow, visual odometry and
motion segmentation leading to overall higher accuracy and efficiency. Our
method is currently ranked third on the KITTI 2015 scene flow benchmark.
Furthermore, our CPU implementation runs in 2-3 seconds per frame which is 1-3
orders of magnitude faster than the top six methods. We also report a thorough
evaluation on challenging Sintel sequences with fast camera and object motion,
where our method consistently outperforms OSF [Menze and Geiger, 2015], which
is currently ranked second on the KITTI benchmark.Comment: 15 pages. To appear at IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern
Recognition (CVPR 2017). Our results were submitted to KITTI 2015 Stereo
Scene Flow Benchmark in November 201
Unsupervised Monocular Depth Estimation with Left-Right Consistency
Learning based methods have shown very promising results for the task of
depth estimation in single images. However, most existing approaches treat
depth prediction as a supervised regression problem and as a result, require
vast quantities of corresponding ground truth depth data for training. Just
recording quality depth data in a range of environments is a challenging
problem. In this paper, we innovate beyond existing approaches, replacing the
use of explicit depth data during training with easier-to-obtain binocular
stereo footage.
We propose a novel training objective that enables our convolutional neural
network to learn to perform single image depth estimation, despite the absence
of ground truth depth data. Exploiting epipolar geometry constraints, we
generate disparity images by training our network with an image reconstruction
loss. We show that solving for image reconstruction alone results in poor
quality depth images. To overcome this problem, we propose a novel training
loss that enforces consistency between the disparities produced relative to
both the left and right images, leading to improved performance and robustness
compared to existing approaches. Our method produces state of the art results
for monocular depth estimation on the KITTI driving dataset, even outperforming
supervised methods that have been trained with ground truth depth.Comment: CVPR 2017 ora
Key characteristics of specular stereo.
Because specular reflection is view-dependent, shiny surfaces behave radically differently from matte, textured surfaces when viewed with two eyes. As a result, specular reflections pose substantial problems for binocular stereopsis. Here we use a combination of computer graphics and geometrical analysis to characterize the key respects in which specular stereo differs from standard stereo, to identify how and why the human visual system fails to reconstruct depths correctly from specular reflections. We describe rendering of stereoscopic images of specular surfaces in which the disparity information can be varied parametrically and independently of monocular appearance. Using the generated surfaces and images, we explain how stereo correspondence can be established with known and unknown surface geometry. We show that even with known geometry, stereo matching for specular surfaces is nontrivial because points in one eye may have zero, one, or multiple matches in the other eye. Matching features typically yield skew (nonintersecting) rays, leading to substantial ortho-epipolar components to the disparities, which makes deriving depth values from matches nontrivial. We suggest that the human visual system may base its depth estimates solely on the epipolar components of disparities while treating the ortho-epipolar components as a measure of the underlying reliability of the disparity signals. Reconstructing virtual surfaces according to these principles reveals that they are piece-wise smooth with very large discontinuities close to inflection points on the physical surface. Together, these distinctive characteristics lead to cues that the visual system could use to diagnose specular reflections from binocular information.The work was funded by the Wellcome Trust (grants 08459/Z/07/Z & 095183/Z/10/Z) and the EU Marie Curie Initial Training Network “PRISM” (FP7-PEOPLE-2012-ITN, Agreement: 316746).This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from ARVO via http://dx.doi.org/10.1167/14.14.1
Low-level Vision by Consensus in a Spatial Hierarchy of Regions
We introduce a multi-scale framework for low-level vision, where the goal is
estimating physical scene values from image data---such as depth from stereo
image pairs. The framework uses a dense, overlapping set of image regions at
multiple scales and a "local model," such as a slanted-plane model for stereo
disparity, that is expected to be valid piecewise across the visual field.
Estimation is cast as optimization over a dichotomous mixture of variables,
simultaneously determining which regions are inliers with respect to the local
model (binary variables) and the correct co-ordinates in the local model space
for each inlying region (continuous variables). When the regions are organized
into a multi-scale hierarchy, optimization can occur in an efficient and
parallel architecture, where distributed computational units iteratively
perform calculations and share information through sparse connections between
parents and children. The framework performs well on a standard benchmark for
binocular stereo, and it produces a distributional scene representation that is
appropriate for combining with higher-level reasoning and other low-level cues.Comment: Accepted to CVPR 2015. Project page:
http://www.ttic.edu/chakrabarti/consensus
Acceleration of stereo-matching on multi-core CPU and GPU
This paper presents an accelerated version of a
dense stereo-correspondence algorithm for two different parallelism
enabled architectures, multi-core CPU and GPU. The
algorithm is part of the vision system developed for a binocular
robot-head in the context of the CloPeMa 1 research project.
This research project focuses on the conception of a new clothes
folding robot with real-time and high resolution requirements
for the vision system. The performance analysis shows that
the parallelised stereo-matching algorithm has been significantly
accelerated, maintaining 12x and 176x speed-up respectively
for multi-core CPU and GPU, compared with non-SIMD singlethread
CPU. To analyse the origin of the speed-up and gain
deeper understanding about the choice of the optimal hardware,
the algorithm was broken into key sub-tasks and the performance
was tested for four different hardware architectures
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