Multi-view structure-from-motion for hybrid camera scenarios

We describe a pipeline for structure-from-motion (SfM) with mixed camera types, namely omnidirectional and perspective cameras. For the steps of this pipeline, we propose new approaches or adapt the existing perspective camera methods to make the pipeline effective and automatic. We model our cameras of different types with the sphere camera model. To match feature points, we describe a preprocessing algorithm which significantly increases scale invariant feature transform (SIFT) matching performance for hybrid image pairs. With this approach, automatic point matching between omnidirectional and perspective images is achieved. We robustly estimate the hybrid fundamental matrix with the obtained point correspondences. We introduce the normalization matrices for lifted coordinates so that normalization and denormalization can be performed linearly for omnidirectional images. We evaluate the alternatives of estimating camera poses in hybrid pairs. A weighting strategy is proposed for iterative linear triangulation which improves the structure estimation accuracy. Following the addition of multiple perspective and omnidirectional images to the structure, we perform sparse bundle adjustment on the estimated structure by adapting it to use the sphere camera model. Demonstrations of the end-to-end multi-view SfM pipeline with the real images of mixed camera types are presented.     

Vision-based navigation of unmanned aerial vehicles

This paper presents a vision-based navigation strategy for a vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) using a single embedded camera observing natural landmarks. In the proposed approach, images of the environment are first sampled, stored and organized as a set of ordered key images (visual path) which provides a visual memory of the environment. The robot navigation task is then defined as a concatenation of visual path subsets (called visual route) linking the current observed image and a target image belonging to the visual memory. The UAV is controlled to reach each image of the visual route using a vision-based control law adapted to its dynamic model and without explicitly planning any trajectory. This framework is largely substantiated by experiments with an X4-flyer equipped with a fisheye camera.     

Scaled layout recovery with wide field of view RGB-D

In this work, we propose a method that integrates depth and fisheye cameras to obtain a wide 3D scene reconstruction with scale in one single shot. The motivation of such integration is to overcome the narrow field of view in consumer RGB-D cameras and lack of depth and scale information in fisheye cameras. The hybrid camera system we use is easy to build and calibrate, and currently consumer devices with similar configuration are already available in the market. With this system, we have a portion of the scene with shared field of view that provides simultaneously color and depth. In the rest of the color image we estimate the depth by recovering the structural information of the scene. Our method finds and ranks corners in the scene combining the extraction of lines in the color image and the depth information. These corners are used to generate plausible layout hypotheses, which have real-world scale due to the usage of depth. The wide angle camera captures more information from the environment (e.g. the ceiling), which helps to overcome severe occlusions. After an automatic evaluation of the hypotheses, we obtain a scaled 3D model expanding the original depth information with the wide scene reconstruction. We show in our experiments with real images from both home-made and commercial systems that our method achieves high success ratio in different scenarios and that our hybrid camera system outperforms the single color camera set-up while additionally providing scale in one single shot.     

Non-uniform image deblurring using an optical computing system

Removing non-uniform blur caused by camera shaking is troublesome because of its high computational cost. We analyze the efficiency bottlenecks of a non-uniform deblurring algorithm and propose an efficient optical computation deblurring framework that implements the time-consuming and repeatedly required modules, i.e., non-uniform convolution and perspective warping, by light transportation. Specifically, the non-uniform convolution and perspective warping are optically computed by a hybrid system that is composed of an off-the-shelf projector and a camera mounted on a programmable motion platform. Benefitting from the high speed and parallelism of optical computation, our system has the potential to accelerate existing non-uniform motion deblurring algorithms significantly. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, we also develop a prototype system that is incorporated into an iterative deblurring framework to effectively address the image blur of planar scenes that is caused by 3D camera rotation around the x-, y- and z-axes. The results show that the proposed approach has a high efficiency while obtaining a promising accuracy and has a high generalizability to more complex camera motions.     

Learned Models for Estimation of Rigid and Articulated Human Motion from Stationary or Moving Camera

We propose an approach for modeling, measurement and tracking of rigid and articulated motion as viewed from a stationary or moving camera. We first propose an approach for learning temporal-flow models from exemplar image sequences. The temporal-flow models are represented as a set of orthogonal temporal-flow bases that are learned using principal component analysis of instantaneous flow measurements. Spatial constraints on the temporal-flow are then incorporated to model the movement of regions of rigid or articulated objects. These spatio-temporal flow models are subsequently used as the basis for simultaneous measurement and tracking of brightness motion in image sequences. Then we address the problem of estimating composite independent object and camera image motions. We employ the spatio-temporal flow models learned through observing typical movements of the object from a stationary camera to decompose image motion into independent object and camera motions. The performance of the algorithms is demonstrated on several long image sequences of rigid and articulated bodies in motion.     

Merging artificial objects with marker-less video sequences based on the interacting multiple model method

Inserting synthetic objects into video sequences has gained much interest in recent years. Fast and robust vision-based algorithms are necessary to make such an application possible. Traditional pose tracking schemes using recursive structure from motion techniques adopt one Kalman filter and thus only favor a certain type of camera motion. We propose a robust simultaneous pose tracking and structure recovery algorithm using the interacting multiple model (IMM) to improve performance. In particular, a set of three extended Kalman filters (EKFs), each describing a frequently occurring camera motion in real situations (general, pure translation, pure rotation), is applied within the IMM framework to track the pose of a scene. Another set of EKFs,one filter for each model point, is used to refine the positions of the model features in the 3-D space. The filters for pose tracking and structure refinement are executed in an interleaved manner. The results are used for inserting virtual objects into the original video footage. The performance of the algorithm is demonstrated with both synthetic and real data. Comparisons with different approaches have been performed and show that our method is more efficient and accurate.     

Passivity-based Visual Motion Observer with Panoramic Camera for Pose Control

This paper considers the vision-based estimation and pose control with a panoramic camera via passivity approach. First, a hyperbolic projection of a panoramic camera is presented. Next, using standard body-attached coordinate frames (the world frame, mirror frame, camera frame and object frame), we represent the body velocity of the relative rigid body motion (position and orientation). After that, we propose a visual motion observer to estimate the relative rigid body motion from the measured camera data. We show that the estimation error system with a panoramic camera has the passivity which allows us to prove stability in the sense of Lyapunov. The visual motion error system which consists of the estimation error system and the pose control error system preserves the passivity. After that, stability and L ₂-gain performance analysis for the closed-loop system are discussed via Lyapunov method and dissipative systems theory, respectively. Finally, simulation and experimental results are shown in order to confirm the proposed method.     

A two‐stage sampling for robust feature matching

For any visual feature‐based SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping) solutions, to estimate the relative camera motion between two images, it is necessary to find “correct” correspondence between features extracted from those images. Given a set of feature correspondents, one can use a n‐point algorithm with robust estimation method, to produce the best estimate to the relative camera pose. The accuracy of a motion estimate is heavily dependent on the accuracy of the feature correspondence. Such a dependency is even more significant when features are extracted from the images of the scenes with drastic changes in viewpoints and illuminations and presence of occlusions. To make a feature matching robust to such challenging scenes, we propose a new feature matching method that incrementally chooses a five pairs of matched features for a full DoF (degree of freedom) camera motion estimation. In particular, at the first stage, we use our 2‐point algorithm to estimate a camera motion and, at the second stage, use this estimated motion to choose three more matched features. In addition, we use, instead of the epipolar constraint, a planar constraint for more accurate outlier rejection. With this set of five matching features, we estimate a full DoF camera motion with scale ambiguity. Through the experiments with three, real‐world data sets, our method demonstrates its effectiveness and robustness by successfully matching features (1) from the images of a night market where presence of frequent occlusions and varying illuminations, (2) from the images of a night market taken by a handheld camera and by the Google street view, and (3) from the images of a same location taken daytime and nighttime.     

Photometric visual servoing for omnidirectional cameras

2D visual servoing consists in using data provided by a vision sensor for controlling the motions of a dynamic system. Most of visual servoing approaches has relied on the geometric features that have to be tracked and matched in the image acquired by the camera. Recent works have highlighted the interest of taking into account the photometric information of the entire image. This approach was tackled with images of perspective cameras. We propose, in this paper, to extend this technique to central cameras. This generalization allows to apply this kind of method to catadioptric cameras and wide field of view cameras. Several experiments have been successfully done with a fisheye camera in order to control a 6 degrees of freedom robot and with a catadioptric camera for a mobile robot navigation task.     

Quasi-perspective Projection Model: Theory and Application to Structure and Motion Factorization from Uncalibrated Image Sequences

This paper addresses the problem of factorization-based 3D reconstruction from uncalibrated image sequences. Previous studies on structure and motion factorization are either based on simplified affine assumption or general perspective projection. The affine approximation is widely adopted due to its simplicity, whereas the extension to perspective model suffers from recovering projective depths. To fill the gap between simplicity of affine and accuracy of perspective model, we propose a quasi-perspective projection model for structure and motion recovery of rigid and nonrigid objects based on factorization framework. The novelty and contribution of this paper are as follows. Firstly, under the assumption that the camera is far away from the object with small lateral rotations, we prove that the imaging process can be modeled by quasi-perspective projection, which is more accurate than affine model from both geometrical error analysis and experimental studies. Secondly, we apply the model to establish a framework of rigid and nonrigid factorization under quasi-perspective assumption. Finally, we propose an Extended Cholesky Decomposition to recover the rotation part of the Euclidean upgrading matrix. We also prove that the last column of the upgrading matrix corresponds to a global scale and translation of the camera thus may be set freely. The proposed method is validated and evaluated extensively on synthetic and real image sequences and improved results over existing schemes are observed.     

Video stabilization using maximally stable extremal region features

Video stabilization is an important technique in present day digital cameras as most of the cameras are hand-held, mounted on moving platforms or subjected to atmospheric vibrations. In this paper we propose a novel video stabilization scheme based on estimating the camera motion using maximally stable extremal region features. These features traditionally used in wide baseline stereo problems were never explored for video stabilization purposes. Through our extensive experiments show we how some properties of these region features are suitable for the stabilization task. After estimating the global camera motion parameters using these region features, we smooth the motion parameters using a gaussian filter to retain the desired motion. Finally, motion compensation is carried out to obtain a stabilized video sequence. A number of examples on real and synthetic videos demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach. We compare our results to existing techniques and show how our proposed approach compares favorably to them. Interframe Transformation Fidelity is used for objective evaluation of our proposed approach.     

Less restrictive camera odometry estimation from monocular camera

This paper addresses the problem of estimating a camera motion from a non-calibrated monocular camera. Compared to existing methods that rely on restrictive assumptions, we propose a method which can estimate camera motion with much less restrictions by adopting new example-based techniques compensating the lack of information. Specifically, we estimate the focal length of the camera by referring to visually similar training images with which focal lengths are associated. For one step camera estimation, we refer to stationary points (landmark points) whose depths are estimated based on RGB-D candidates. In addition to landmark points, moving objects can be also used as an information source to estimate the camera motion. Therefore, our method simultaneously estimates the camera motion for a video, and the 3D trajectories of objects in this video by using Reversible Jump Markov Chain Monte Carlo (RJ-MCMC) particle filtering. Our method is evaluated on challenging datasets demonstrating its effectiveness and efficiency.     

Motion estimation by decoupling rotation and translation in catadioptric vision

Previous works have shown that catadioptric systems are particularly suited for egomotion estimation thanks to their large field of view and thus numerous algorithms have already been proposed in the literature to estimate the motion. In this paper, we present a method for estimating six degrees of freedom camera motions from central catadioptric images in man-made environments. State-of-the-art methods can obtain very impressive results. However, our proposed system provides two strong advantages over the existing methods: first, it can implicitly handle the difficulty of planar/non-planar scenes, and second, it is computationally much less expensive. The only assumption deals with the presence of parallel straight lines which is reasonable in a man-made environment. More precisely, we estimate the motion by decoupling the rotation and the translation. The rotation is computed by an efficient algorithm based on the detection of dominant bundles of parallel catadioptric lines and the translation is calculated from a robust 2-point algorithm. We also show that the line-based approach allows to estimate the absolute attitude (roll and pitch angles) at each frame, without error accumulation. The efficiency of our approach has been validated by experiments in both indoor and outdoor environments and also by comparison with other existing methods.     

摄像机运动情况下的运动对象检测

在监控应用中,由于场景是已知的,因此可以使用背景减去法检测运动对象.当摄像机进行扫描和倾斜运动时,需要使用多个图像帧才能完整地表示监控场景.如何组织和索引这些背景帧属于摄像机跟踪问题.提出一种无需摄像机标定的背景帧索引和访问方法.这一方法需要使用图像配准技术估计图像初始运动参数.提出一种屏蔽外点的图像配准算法,综合利用线性回归和稳健回归快速估计初始运动参数.为了快速计算连续帧之间的运动参数,提出一种基于四参数模型的优化算法.利用非参数背景维护模型抑制虚假运动象素.室内和户外实验结果表明本文方法是有效的.     

鱼眼相机与PTZ相机相结合的主从目标监控系统

提出了一种将鱼眼相机和PTZ相机相结合的主从目标监控系统,充分利用鱼眼相机单镜头半球空间成像以及PTZ相机指向性高分辨率成像的优点,实现了单系统半球空间运动目标的高分辨率成像监控。首先采用运动点团模式实现鱼眼图像中运动目标的检测;然后在鱼眼图像空间计算目标的相对方位角P′、俯仰角T′和距离Z′;最后通过参数映射将其映射到PTZ图像空间,输出PTZ控制信号给相机进行指向性成像。PTZ图像空间中的P参数和T参数结合鱼眼镜头畸变系数进行校正计算,Z参数根据目标在鱼眼图像中的相对尺寸及PTZ图像中需要的尺寸进行计算。通过对PTZ参数的多次实验测量,其结果的误差均在系统要求范围之内。系统实际的户外测试结果表明,系统能准确检测出鱼眼图像中的运动目标,在PTZ参数的控制下,PTZ相机能准确指向目标进行二次高分辨率成像,目标在PTZ图像中的位置和大小合适,达到预期的设计目标。     

Adaptive robust estimation of affine parameters from block motion vectors

In this paper, we propose an affine parameter estimation algorithm from block motion vectors for extracting accurate motion information with the assumption that the undergoing motion can be characterized by an affine model. The motion may be caused either by a moving camera or a moving object. The proposed method first extracts motion vectors from a sequence of images by using size-variable block matching and then processes them by adaptive robust estimation to estimate affine parameters. Typically, a robust estimation filters out outliers (velocity vectors that do not fit into the model) by fitting velocity vectors to a predefined model. To filter out potential outliers, our adaptive robust estimation defines a continuous weight function based on a Sigmoid function. During the estimation process, we tune the Sigmoid function gradually to its hard-limit as the errors between the model and input data are decreased, so that we can effectively separate non-outliers from outliers with the help of the finally tuned hard-limit form of the weight function. Experimental results show that the suggested approach is very effective in estimating affine parameters reliably.     

Moving object detection and segmentation in urban environments from a moving platform

This paper proposes an effective approach to detect and segment moving objects from two time-consecutive stereo frames, which leverages the uncertainties in camera motion estimation and in disparity computation. First, the relative camera motion and its uncertainty are computed by tracking and matching sparse features in four images. Then, the motion likelihood at each pixel is estimated by taking into account the ego-motion uncertainty and disparity in computation procedure. Finally, the motion likelihood, color and depth cues are combined in the graph-cut framework for moving object segmentation. The efficiency of the proposed method is evaluated on the KITTI benchmarking datasets, and our experiments show that the proposed approach is robust against both global (camera motion) and local (optical flow) noise. Moreover, the approach is dense as it applies to all pixels in an image, and even partially occluded moving objects can be detected successfully. Without dedicated tracking strategy, our approach achieves high recall and comparable precision on the KITTI benchmarking sequences.     

Autonomous robot calibration using vision technology

Unlike the traditional robot calibration methods, which need external expensive calibration apparatus and elaborate setups to measure the 3D feature points in the reference frame, a vision-based self-calibration method for a serial robot manipulator, which only requires a ground-truth scale in the reference frame, is proposed in this paper. The proposed algorithm assumes that the camera is rigidly attached to the robot end-effector, which makes it possible to obtain the pose of the manipulator with the pose of the camera. By designing a manipulator movement trajectory, the camera poses can be estimated up to a scale factor at each configuration with the factorization method, where a nonlinear least-square algorithm is applied to improve its robustness. An efficient approach is proposed to estimate this scale factor. The great advantage of this self-calibration method is that only image sequences of a calibration object and a ground-truth length are needed, which makes the robot calibration procedure more autonomous in a dynamic manufacturing environment. Simulations and experimental studies on a PUMA 560 robot reveal the convenience and effectiveness of the proposed robot self-calibration approach.     

一种改进的视觉罗盘姿态测量方法

Montiel等人提出的“视觉罗盘”是一种以摄像机为唯一传感器,基于EKF-SLAM的姿态测量方法.在摄像机旋转不平滑时需要提高运动模型中系统噪声的先验方差设定值,但是会导致匹配计算量增大和匹配错误发生率升高.针对上述问题,本文给出一种改进的视觉罗盘姿态测量方法.该方法首先使用多分辨率路标选取策略初始化新路标,然后使用...