The image torque operator: A new tool for mid-level vision

Contours are a powerful cue for semantic image understanding. Objects and parts of objects in the image are delineated from their surrounding by closed contours which make up their boundary. In this paper we introduce a new bottom-up visual operator to capture the concept of closed contours, which we call the ’Torque ’ operator. Its computation is inspired by the mechanical definition of torque or moment of force, and applied to image edges. The torque operator takes as input edges and computes over regions of different size a measure of how well the edges are aligned to form a closed, convex contour. We explore fundamental properties of this measure and demonstrate that it can be made a useful tool for visual attention, segmentation, and boundary edge detection by verifying its benefits on these applications. 1

Robot acting on moving bodies (RAMBO): Preliminary results

A robot system called RAMBO is being developed. It is equipped with a camera, which, given a sequence of simple tasks, can perform these tasks on a moving object. RAMBO is given a complete geometric model of the object. A low level vision module extracts and groups characteristic features in images of the object. The positions of the object are determined in a sequence of images, and a motion estimate of the object is obtained. This motion estimate is used to plan trajectories of the robot tool to relative locations nearby the object sufficient for achieving the tasks. More specifically, low level vision uses parallel algorithms for image enchancement by symmetric nearest neighbor filtering, edge detection by local gradient operators, and corner extraction by sector filtering. The object pose estimation is a Hough transform method accumulating position hypotheses obtained by matching triples of image features (corners) to triples of model features. To maximize computing speed, the estimate of the position in space of a triple of features is obtained by decomposing its perspective view into a product of rotations and a scaled orthographic projection. This allows the use of 2-D lookup tables at each stage of the decomposition. The position hypotheses for each possible match of model feature triples and image feature triples are calculated in parallel. Trajectory planning combines heuristic and dynamic programming techniques. Then trajectories are created using parametric cubic splines between initial and goal trajectories. All the parallel algorithms run on a Connection Machine CM-2 with 16K processors

Robot Acting on Moving Bodies (RAMBO): Interaction with tumbling objects

Interaction with tumbling objects will become more common as human activities in space expand. Attempting to interact with a large complex object translating and rotating in space, a human operator using only his visual and mental capacities may not be able to estimate the object motion, plan actions or control those actions. A robot system (RAMBO) equipped with a camera, which, given a sequence of simple tasks, can perform these tasks on a tumbling object, is being developed. RAMBO is given a complete geometric model of the object. A low level vision module extracts and groups characteristic features in images of the object. The positions of the object are determined in a sequence of images, and a motion estimate of the object is obtained. This motion estimate is used to plan trajectories of the robot tool to relative locations rearby the object sufficient for achieving the tasks. More specifically, low level vision uses parallel algorithms for image enhancement by symmetric nearest neighbor filtering, edge detection by local gradient operators, and corner extraction by sector filtering. The object pose estimation is a Hough transform method accumulating position hypotheses obtained by matching triples of image features (corners) to triples of model features. To maximize computing speed, the estimate of the position in space of a triple of features is obtained by decomposing its perspective view into a product of rotations and a scaled orthographic projection. This allows use of 2-D lookup tables at each stage of the decomposition. The position hypotheses for each possible match of model feature triples and image feature triples are calculated in parallel. Trajectory planning combines heuristic and dynamic programming techniques. Then trajectories are created using dynamic interpolations between initial and goal trajectories. All the parallel algorithms run on a Connection Machine CM-2 with 16K processors

The DREAM Dataset: Supporting a data-driven study of autism spectrum disorder and robot enhanced therapy

We present a dataset of behavioral data recorded from 61 children diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). The data was collected during a large-scale evaluation of Robot Enhanced Therapy (RET). The dataset covers over 3000 therapy sessions and more than 300 hours of therapy. Half of the children interacted with the social robot NAO supervised by a therapist. The other half, constituting a control group, interacted directly with a therapist. Both groups followed the Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) protocol. Each session was recorded with three RGB cameras and two RGBD (Kinect) cameras, providing detailed information of children’s behavior during therapy. This public release of the dataset comprises body motion, head position and orientation, and eye gaze variables, all specified as 3D data in a joint frame of reference. In addition, metadata including participant age, gender, and autism diagnosis (ADOS) variables are included. We release this data with the hope of supporting further data-driven studies towards improved therapy methods as well as a better understanding of ASD in general.CC BY 4.0DREAM - Development of robot-enhanced therapy for children with autism spectrum disorders

De la vision artificielle à la réalité synthétique : système d'interaction avec un ordinateur utilisant l'analyse d'images vidéo

We describe a system allowing an interaction with a virtual tridimensional scene created by a computer. The operator holds in his hand a pointer (a "mouse") including a spatial distribution of light sources. A camera captures video images of these lightsNous decrivons un systeme qui permet d'interagir avec une scene virtuelle tridimensionnelle creee par un ordinateur. L'operateur tient dans la main un pointeur (une "souris") comportant une distribution spatiale de sources de lumiere. Une camera saisi

Spatio-Temporal Segmentation of Video by Hierarchical Mean Shift Analysis

We describe a simple new technique for spatio-temporal segmentation of video sequences. Each pixel of a 3D space-time video stack is mapped to a 7D feature point whose coordinates include three color components, two motion angle components and two motion position components. The clustering of these feature points provides color segmentation and motion segmentation, as well as a consistent labeling of regions over time which amounts to region tracking. For this task we have adopted a hierarchical clustering method which operates by repeatedly applying mean shift analysis over increasing large ranges, using at each pass the cluster centers of the previous pass, with weights equal to the counts of the points that contributed to the clusters. This technique has lower complexity for large mean shift radii than regular mean shift analysis because it can use binary tree structures more efficiently during range search. In addition, it provides a hierarchical segmentation of the data. Applications include video compression and compact descriptions of video sequences for video indexing and retrieval applications

Object recognition in high clutter images using line features

We present an object recognition algorithm that uses model and image line features to locate complex objects in high clutter environments. Finding correspondences between model and image features is the main challenge in most object recognition systems. In our approach, corresponding line features are determined by a three-stage process. The first stage generates a large number of approximate pose hypotheses from correspondences of one or two lines in the model and image. Next, the pose hypotheses from the previous stage are quickly ranked by comparing local image neighborhoods to the corresponding local model neighborhoods. Fast nearest neighbor and range search algorithms are used to implement a distance measure that is unaffected by clutter and partial occlusion. The ranking of pose hypotheses is invariant to changes in image scale, orientation, and partially invariant to affine distortion. Finally, a robust pose estimation algorithm is applied for refinement and verification, starting from the few best approximate poses produced by the previous stages. Experiments on real images demonstrate robust recognition of partially occluded objects in very high clutter environments. 1