Central catadioptric cameras have been extensively adopted in robotics and surveillance due to their extensive field of view.To attain precise 3D information in these applications,it is important to calibrate the catadioptric cameras accurately.The existing calibration techniques either require prior knowledge of the mirror types,or highly depend on a conic estimation procedure,which might be ruined if there are only small portions of the conic visible on calibration images.In this paper,we design a novel planar pattern with concurrent lines as a calibration rig,which is more robust in conic estimation since the relationship among lines is taken into account.Based on the line properties,we propose a rough-to-fine approach suitable for the new planar pattern to calibrate central catadioptric cameras.This method divides the nonlinear optimization calibration problem into several linear sub-problems that are much more robust against noise.Our calibration method can estimate intrinsic parameters and the mirror parameter simultaneously and accurately,without a priori knowledge of the mirror type.The performance is demonstrated by both simulation and a real hyperbolic catadioptric imaging system.
The rate and distortion of Id-slice do not fit the globally linear relationship on a logarithmic scale. Lagrange multiplier selection methods based on the globally linear approximate relationship are neither efficient nor optimal for multi-view video coding (MVC). To improve the coding efficiency of MVC, a local curve fitting based Lagrange multiplier selection method is proposed in this paper, where Lagrange multipliers are selected according to the local slopes of the approximate curves. Experi-mental results showed that the proposed method improves the coding efficiency. Up to 2.5 dB gain was achieved at low bitrates.
Existing water hazard detection methods usually fail when the features of water surfaces are greatly changed by the surroundings, e.g., by a change in illumination. This paper proposes a novel algorithm to robustly detect different kinds of water hazards for autonomous navigation. Our algorithm combines traditional machine learning and image segmentation and uses only digital cameras, which are usually affordable, as the visual sensors. Active learning is used for automatically dealing with problems caused by the selection, labeling and classification of large numbers of training sets. Mean-shift based image segmentation is used to refine the final classification. Our experimental results show that our new algorithm can accurately detect not only ‘common’ water hazards, which usually have the features of both high brightness and low texture, but also ‘special’ water hazards that may have lots of ripples or low brightness.
Motion estimation is an important issue in H.264 video coding systems because it occupies a large amount of encoding time.In this paper,a novel search algorithm which utilizes an adaptive hexagon and small diamond search (AHSDS) is proposed to enhance search speed.The search pattern is chosen according to the motion strength of the current block.When the block is in active motion,the hexagon search provides an efficient search means;when the block is inactive,the small diamond search is adopted.Simulation results showed that our approach can speed up the search process with little effect on distortion performance compared with other adaptive approaches.
This paper presents a pure vision based technique for 3D reconstruction of planet terrain. The reconstruction accuracy depends ultimately on an optimization technique known as 'bundle adjustment'. In vision techniques, the translation is only known up to a scale factor, and a single scale factor is assumed for the whole sequence of images if only one camera is used. If an extra camera is available, stereo vision based reconstruction can be obtained by binocular views. If the baseline of the stereo setup is known, the scale factor problem is solved. We found that direct application of classical bundle adjustment on the constraints inherent between the binocular views has not been tested. Our method incorporated this constraint into the conventional bundle adjustment method. This special binocular bundle adjustment has been performed on image sequences similar to planet terrain circumstances. Experimental results show that our special method enhances not only the localization accuracy, but also the terrain mapping quality.
