A multiscanning approach based on morphological filtering

It is argued that the mathematical morphology method seems to be more reasonable and powerful in studying certain multiscaling vision problems than the approach that uses derivatives of Gaussian-shaped filters of different sizes. To show the validity of this method, the authors concentrated on an application that involves forming scale-space image of a 2-D shape using morphological opening filtering. A proof is given to show that morphological opening filtering has a property of not introducing additional zero-crossings as one moves to a coarser scale. This is a different result from the conclusion by A.L. Yuille and T.A. Poggio (ibid., vol.PAMI-8, Jan. 1986) that the Gaussian filter is the only filter with this property. In addition, opening filtering is computationaly simpler than the Gaussian filter     

Fast implementation of scale-space by interpolatory subdivisionscheme

While the scale-space approach has been widely used in computer vision, there has been a great interest in fast implementation of scale-space filtering. We introduce an interpolatory subdivision scheme (ISS) for this purpose. In order to extract the geometric features in a scale-space representation, discrete derivative approximations are usually needed. Hence, a general procedure is also introduced to derive exact formulae for numerical differentiation with respect to this ISS. Then, from ISS, an algorithm is derived for fast approximation of scale-space filtering. Moreover, the relationship between the ISS and the Whittaker-Shannon sampling theorem and the commonly used spline technique is discussed. As an example of the application of ISS technique, we present some examples on fast implementation of λτ-spaces as introduced by Gokmen and Jain (1997), which encompasses various famous edge detection filters. It is shown that the ISS technique demonstrates high performance in fast implementation of the scale-space filtering and feature extraction     

Linear Scale-Space has First been Proposed in Japan

Linear scale-space is considered to be a modern bottom-up tool in computer vision. The American and European vision community, however, is unaware of the fact that it has already been axiomatically derived in 1959 in a Japanese paper by Taizo Iijima. This result formed the starting point of vast linear scale-space research in Japan ranging from various axiomatic derivations over deep structure analysis to applications to optical character recognition. Since the outcomes of these activities are unknown to western scale-space researchers, we give an overview of the contribution to the development of linear scale-space theories and analyses. In particular, we review four Japanese axiomatic approaches that substantiate linear scale-space theories proposed between 1959 and 1981. By juxtaposing them to ten American or European axiomatics, we present an overview of the state-of-the-art in Gaussian scale-space axiomatics. Furthermore, we show that many techniques for analysing linear scale-space have also been pioneered by Japanese researchers.     

Linear Scale-Space Theory from Physical Principles

In the past decades linear scale-space theory was derived on the basis of various axiomatics. In this paper we revisit these axioms and show that they merely coincide with the following physical principles, namely that the image domain is a Galilean space, that the total energy exchange between a region and its surrounding is preserved under linear filtering and that the physical observables should be invariant under the group of similarity transformations. These observables are elements of the similarity jet spanned by natural coordinates and differential energies read out by a vision system.Furthermore, linear scale-space theory is extended to spatio-temporal images on bounded and curved domains. Our theory permits a delay-operation at the present moment which is in agreement with the motion detection model of Reichardt. In this respect our theory deviates from that of Koenderink which requires additional syntactical operators to realise such a delay-operation.Finally, the semi-discrete and discrete linear scale-space theories are derived by discretising the continuous theories following the theory of stochastic processes. The relation and difference between our stochastic approach and that of Lindeberg is pointed out. The connection between continuous and (semi-)discrete sale-space theory for infinitely high scales observed by Lindeberg is refined by applying appropriate scaling limits. It is shown that Lindeberg's requirement of normalisation for one-dimensional discrete Green's functions can be incorporated into our theory for arbitrary dimensional discrete Green's functions, parameter determination can be avoided, and the requirement of operation at even and odd coordinates sum can be guaranteed simultaneously by taking a normalised linear combination of the identity operator and the first step discrete Green's functions. The new discrete Green's functions are still intimately related to the continuous Green's functions and appear to coincide with pyramidal discrete Green's functions.     

双摄象头三维视觉系统

本文介绍了一种较实用的双摄象头三维视觉系统.主要讨论了视场内具有六个自由度物体的定位问题.系统以Frei和Chen方法抽取边缘,并运用了非均匀量化和预加重技术.采用了改进的Moravec兴趣算子法,实现了特征点的自动抽取.基于边缘的序贯分层配准法大大缩短了配准时间.在用三维数据获取物体姿态时.根据刚体运动总结的规则解决了工作特征点和模型点匹配时的组合爆炸问题和多义性问题.     

Evaluation of a hypothesizer for silhouette-based 3-D object recognition

Shape retrieval and shape-based object recognition are closely related problems; however, they have different task contexts, performance criteria, and database characteristics. In previous work, we proposed a method for similarity-based 2-D shape retrieval using scale-space part decompositions, part-frequency distributions, and structural indexing. In this paper, we evaluate the use of that shape retrieval method as the hypothesis generation component of silhouette-based 3-D object recognition systems, using a performance criterion and test database appropriate for the new application.     

基于图像的三维物体测量技术研究

针对非接触性测量问题,提出了利用数码相机对物体进行三维测量的一套实验方案.首先选用技术成熟的Harris算法对被测物体进行特征点提取,其次根据计算机视觉基础理论对数码相机内外部参数进行整体标定,并于标定过程中提出一种利用标准棋盘格图像与传统标定物体相结合的方法.最后,根据该方案进行了实例仿真,与传统相机标定相比提高了精度,简化了求解的复杂性.     

An augmented-reality-based real-time panoramic vision system for autonomous navigation

The paper discusses a panoramic vision system for autonomous-navigation purposes. It describes an economic PC-based method for integrating data from multiple camera sources in real time. The views from adjacent cameras are visualized together as a panorama of the scene using a modified correlation-based stitching algorithm. A separate operator is presented with a particular slice of the panorama matching the user's viewing direction. Additionally, a simulated environment is created where the operator can choose to augment the video by simultaneously viewing an artificial three-dimensional (3-D) view of the scene. Potential applications of this system include enhancing quality and range of visual cues, and navigation under hostile circumstances where direct view of the environment is not possible or desirable.     

Two-dimensional linear prediction model-based decorrelation method

A unified feature extraction scheme, the two-dimensional (2-D) linear prediction model-based decorrelation method, is presented. By applying 2-D causal linear prediction model to decorrelate a textured image, the very heavy computation load required when using a whitening operator to decorrelate the image, or the significant information loss when using the gradient operator to approximately whiten the image is avoided. The texture model-based decorrelation provides three sets of features to perform texture classification: the coefficients of the 2-D linear prediction, the moments of error residuals and the autocorrelation values. An optimum feature-selection scheme using modified branch-and-bound method was introduced to reduce information redundancy. After feature selection, 100% classification accuracy was achieved for a 20-class texture problem. Experiments show that this feature extraction scheme is truly information lossless, effective, and fast     

Morphological hat-transform scale spaces and their use in pattern classification

In this paper we present a multi-scale method based on mathematical morphology which can successfully be used in pattern classification tasks. A connected operator similar to the morphological hat-transform is defined, and two scale-space representations are built. The most important features are extracted from the scale spaces by unsupervised cluster analysis, and the resulting pattern vectors provide the input of a decision tree classifier. We report classification results obtained using contour features, texture features, and a combination of these. The method has been tested on two large sets, a database of diatom images and a set of images from the Brodatz texture database. For the diatom images, the method is applied twice, once on the curvature of the outline (contour), and once on the grey-scale image itself.     

Range Image Segmentation through Pattern Analysis of the Multiscale Wavelet Transform

This work presents an image segmentation method for range data that uses multiscale wavelet analysis in combination with statistical pattern recognition. A feature-detection framework based on multiscale analysis and pattern recognition has several potential advantages over other feature detection systems. These advantages are detection of features at different scales (i.e., features of all sizes), robustness, and few or no free parameters. Our system creates a fuzzy edge map and derives a segmentation from this edge detection. A scale-space signature is the vector of measurements at different scales taken at a single point in an image. We analyze these 1-D signatures with traditional pattern-recognition methods. We train a pattern-recognition system with scale-space signatures from the edge points of a training image. Once trained, the system determines the degree ofedgenessof points in a new image. The goal is to create a system that exploits the advantages of a multiscale, pattern-recognition framework.     

符合人类视觉感知的图像对象分割方法

提出一种符合人类视觉感知的图像对象分割方法,包括双尺度的区域分割和基于模型的对象提取。运用非线性尺度算子对图像进行大尺度平滑,结合颜色量化和视觉一致性的颜色聚类完成图像的粗分割。在原尺度上融合区域的纹理、颜色信息对分割区域进行区域合并,并利用对象模型完成图像对象的提取。实验结果表明,该算法的分割结果符合人类视觉感知特性,能够较好地完成图像对象分割。     

基于快速尺度空间特征检测的手势识别方法

在基于几何模型的手势识别方法中,尺度空间特征检测是一种最常用的方法。由于传统方法涉及大量的高斯卷积运算,计算非常复杂。提出了一种快速的尺度空间特征检测方法,采用一组简单的矩形特征模板近似传统方法中复杂的高斯导数卷积模板,得到了尺度空间几何特征的快速检测子。通过对手势图像中Blob和Ridge结构的检测,得到手掌和手指结构的描述,进而完成手势识别。矩形特征模板的卷积可以用积分图进行快速计算,该方法使特征检测的速度得到了很大提高。在标准数据集和自然环境图像数据上的实验结果表明,该方法在保证识别准确率的同时,有效地提高了手势识别的实时性。     

Feature Detection with Automatic Scale Selection

The fact that objects in the world appear in different ways depending on the scale of observation has important implications if one aims at describing them. It shows that the notion of scale is of utmost importance when processing unknown measurement data by automatic methods. In their seminal works, Witkin (1983) and Koenderink (1984) proposed to approach this problem by representing image structures at different scales in a so-called scale-space representation. Traditional scale-space theory building on this work, however, does not address the problem of how to select local appropriate scales for further analysis. This article proposes a systematic methodology for dealing with this problem. A framework is presented for generating hypotheses about interesting scale levels in image data, based on a general principle stating that local extrema over scales of different combinations of -normalized derivatives are likely candidates to correspond to interesting structures. Specifically, it is shown how this idea can be used as a major mechanism in algorithms for automatic scale selection, which adapt the local scales of processing to the local image structure.Support for the proposed approach is given in terms of a general theoretical investigation of the behaviour of the scale selection method under rescalings of the input pattern and by integration with different types of early visual modules, including experiments on real-world and synthetic data. Support is also given by a detailed analysis of how different types of feature detectors perform when integrated with a scale selection mechanism and then applied to characteristic model patterns. Specifically, it is described in detail how the proposed methodology applies to the problems of blob detection, junction detection, edge detection, ridge detection and local frequency estimation.In many computer vision applications, the poor performance of the low-level vision modules constitutes a major bottleneck. It is argued that the inclusion of mechanisms for automatic scale selection is essential if we are to construct vision systems to automatically analyse complex unknown environments.     

A novel white blood cell segmentation scheme based on feature space clustering

This paper presents a novel white blood cell (WBC) segmentation scheme based on two feature space clustering techniques: scale-space filtering and watershed clustering. In this scheme, nucleus and cytoplasm, the two components of WBC, are extracted, respectively, using different methods. First, a sub image containing WBC is separated from the original cell image. Then, scale-space filtering is used to extract nucleus region from sub image. Later, a watershed clustering in 3-D HSV histogram is processed to extract cytoplasm region. Finally, morphological operations are performed to obtain the entire connective WBC region. Through feature space clustering techniques, this scheme successfully avoids the variety and complexity in image space, and can effectively extract WBC regions from various cell images of peripheral blood smear. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed scheme performs much better than former methods.     

A Target Grabbing Strategy for Telerobot Based on Improved Stiffness Display Device

Most target grabbing problems have been dealt with by computer vision system, however, computer vision method is not always enough when it comes to the precision contact grabbing problems during the teleoperation process, and need to be combined with the stiffness display to provide more effective information to the operator on the remote side. Therefore, in this paper a more portable stiffness display device with a small volume and extended function is developed based on our previous work. A new static load calibration of the improved stiffness display device is performed to detect its accuracy, and the relationship between the stiffness and the position is given. An effective target grabbing strategy is presented to help operator on the remote side to judge and control and the target is classified by multi-class SVM (supporter vector machine). The teleoperation system is established to test and verify the feasibility. A special experiment is designed and the results demonstrate that the improved stiffness display device could greatly help operator on the remote side control the telerobot to grab target and the target grabbing strategy is effective.