Ground-Plane Based Projective Reconstruction for Surveillance Camera Networks

This paper examines the task of calibrating a network of security cameras of arbitrary topology utilizing a common ground-plane to simplify the geometry. The method of chaining ground-plane homographies is employed to overcome the necessity that a common region is visible in all images of the ground-plane. We show that this method of recovering a projective reconstruction is ideal for the case of surveillance camera networks due to the ability to linearly initialize the cameras and structure when making use of the common ground-plane assumption

Hessian-based affine adaptation of salient local image features

Affine covariant local image features are a powerful tool for many applications, including matching and calibrating wide baseline images. Local feature extractors that use a saliency map to locate features require adaptation processes in order to extract affine covariant features. The most effective extractors make use of the second moment matrix (SMM) to iteratively estimate the affine shape of local image regions. This paper shows that the Hessian matrix can be used to estimate local affine shape in a similar fashion to the SMM. The Hessian matrix requires significantly less computation effort than the SMM, allowing more efficient affine adaptation. Experimental results indicate that using the Hessian matrix in conjunction with a feature extractor that selects features in regions with high second order gradients delivers equivalent quality correspondences in less than 17% of the processing time, compared to the same extractor using the SMM

3D Open Innovation – Practices and Outcomes

The purpose of the paper is to conceptualise open innovation openness in three dimensions covering partners, innovation phases and content, and to use a large-scale survey to empirically examine how the openness affect innovation and economic performance. The study is based on a survey of R&D managers or similar in 327 Italian and Swedish firms. The results show that firms apply different kinds of openness in relation to the analysed dimensions of openness, but that the three dimensions are highly interrelated. Overall, customers and suppliers are the most common partners in open innovation; the collaboration with them mainly takes place during the experimentation and engineering phase in order to capture advanced technologies, products and processes, but also to capture suppliers’ capabilities in supply chain and project management. The diversity of firms is, however,significant and underlines open innovation as a multi-faceted approach. The study further shows that innovation and economic performance are mainly explained by the intensity in partner collaboration and the depth of contents provided by the partners, while the number of partner is negatively correlated to performance

Are We Actually in the Open Innovation Era? Current Practices of European Manufacturing Companies

During the last decade, many researchers have claimed that we are in the era of open innovation. However,an extensive picture of the actual implementation of open innovation is still lacking. In order to address this, a research project was launched, called Open Innovation Survey (in the following, OIS project), involving five European countries (Italy, Spain, UK, Sweden and Finland). The research project is focused on inbound innovation and it is aimed at identifying the Open Innovation models through which firms open their innovation funnel to their external partners, by means of an extended survey. The paper presents the first tentative results drawn from the survey, in terms of descriptive statistics and cluster analysis, which allows depicting the different innovation models actually adopted in the practice of companies

Introducing Design Descriptions on Different Levels of Concretisation in a Platform Definition

Product platforms has been widely accepted in industry as a means to reach both high product variety while maintaining business efficiency. For suppliers of highly customised products, however, the development of a platform based upon predefined modules is a challenge. This is due to the large differ-ences between the various systems their products are to be integrated into and the customer's individual preferences. What is common for most platform descriptions is the high level of concretisation, such as predefined modules, they are built upon, but how can companies act when that is not possible? Are there other principles that can be used for the definition of a product platform? This paper presents a concept to incorporate other types of descriptions of different levels of concretisation into a product platform. Parts of the concept has been realised in a computer support tool and tested at a case company in order to improve their quotation process.ChaS