Unifying Perspectives In Computational And Robot Vision

Assembled in this volume is a collection of some of the state-of-the-art methods that are using computer vision and machine learning techniques as applied in robotic applications. Currently there is a gap between research conducted in the computer vision and robotics communities. This volume discusses contrasting viewpoints of computer vision vs. robotics, and provides current and future challenges discussed from a research perspective.

Assembled in this volume is a collection of some of the state-of-the-art methods that are using computer vision and machine learning techniques as applied in robotic applications. Currently there is a gap between research conducted in the computer vision and robotics communities. This volume discusses contrasting viewpoints of computer vision vs. robotics, and provides current and future challenges discussed from a research perspective.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the International Workshop on Robot Vision, RobVis 2001, held in Auckland, New Zealand in February 2001.The 17 revised full papers presented together with 17 posters were carefully reviewed and selected from 52 submissions. The papers and posters are organized in topical sections on active perception, computer vision, robotics and video, computational stereo, robotic vision, and image acquisition.

The purpose of robot vision is to enable robots to perceive the external world in order to perform a large range of tasks such as navigation, visual servoing for object tracking and manipulation, object recognition and categorization, surveillance, and higher-level decision-making. Among different perceptual modalities, vision is arguably the most important one. It is therefore an essential building block of a cognitive robot. This book presents a snapshot of the wide variety of work in robot vision that is currently going on in different parts of the world.

This textbook offers a tutorial introduction to robotics and Computer Vision which is light and easy to absorb. The practice of robotic vision involves the application of computational algorithms to data. Over the fairly recent history of the fields of robotics and computer vision a very large body of algorithms has been developed. However this body of knowledge is something of a barrier for anybody entering the field, or even looking to see if they want to enter the field — What is the right algorithm for a particular problem?, and importantly: How can I try it out without spending days coding and debugging it from the original research papers? The author has maintained two open-source MATLAB Toolboxes for more than 10 years: one for robotics and one for vision. The key strength of the Toolboxes provide a set of tools that allow the user to work with real problems, not trivial examples. For the student the book makes the algorithms accessible, the Toolbox code can be read to gain understanding, and the examples illustrate how it can be used —instant gratification in just a couple of lines of MATLAB code. The code can also be the starting point for new work, for researchers or students, by writing programs based on Toolbox functions, or modifying the Toolbox code itself. The purpose of this book is to expand on the tutorial material provided with the toolboxes, add many more examples, and to weave this into a narrative that covers robotics and computer vision separately and together. The author shows how complex problems can be decomposed and solved using just a few simple lines of code, and hopefully to inspire up and coming researchers. The topics covered are guided by the real problems observed over many years as a practitioner of both robotics and computer vision. It is written in a light but informative style, it is easy to read and absorb, and includes a lot of Matlab examples and figures. The book is a real walk through the fundamentals light and color, camera modelling, image processing, feature extraction and multi-view geometry, and bring it all together in a visual servo system. “An authoritative book, reaching across fields, thoughtfully conceived and brilliantly accomplished Oussama Khatib, Stanford

The book is intended for advanced students in physics, mathematics, computer science, electrical engineering, robotics, engine engineering and for specialists in computer vision and robotics on the techniques for the development of vision-based robot projects. It focusses on autonomous and mobile service robots for indoor work, and teaches the techniques for the development of vision-based robot projects. A basic knowledge of informatics is assumed, but the basic introduction helps to adjust the knowledge of the reader accordingly. A practical treatment of the material enables a comprehensive understanding of how to handle specific problems, such as inhomogeneous illumination or occlusion. With this book, the reader should be able to develop object-oriented programs and show mathematical basic understanding. Such topics as image processing, navigation, camera types and camera calibration structure the described steps of developing further applications of vision-based robot projects.

The two volumes LNCS 6553 and 6554 constitute the refereed post-proceedings of 7 workshops held in conjunction with the 11th European Conference on Computer Vision, held in Heraklion, Crete, Greece in September 2010. The 62 revised papers presented together with 2 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The first volume contains 26 revised papers and 2 invited talks selected from the following workshops: First International Workshop on Parts and Attributes; Third Workshop on Human Motion Understanding, Modeling, Capture and Animation; and International Workshop on Sign, Gesture and Activity (SGA 2010).