Visual Navigation

All biological systems with vision move about their environments and successfully perform many tasks. The same capabilities are needed in the world of robots. To that end, recent results in empirical fields that study insects and primates, as well as in theoretical and applied disciplines that design robots, have uncovered a number of the principles of navigation. To offer a unifying approach to the situation, this book brings together ideas from zoology, psychology, neurobiology, mathematics, geometry, computer science, and engineering. It contains theoretical developments that will be essential in future research on the topic -- especially new representations of space with less complexity than Euclidean representations possess. These representations allow biological and artificial systems to compute from images in order to successfully deal with their environments. In this book, the barriers between different disciplines have been smoothed and the workings of vision systems of biological organisms are made clear in computational terms to computer scientists and engineers. At the same time, fundamental principles arising from computational considerations are made clear both to empirical scientists and engineers. Empiricists can generate a number of hypotheses that they could then study through various experiments. Engineers can gain insight for designing robotic systems that perceive aspects of their environment. For the first time, readers will find: * the insect vision system presented in a way that can be understood by computational scientists working in computer vision and engineering; * three complete, working robotic navigation systems presented with all the issues related to their design analyzed in detail; * the beginning of a computational theory of direct perception, as advocated by Gibson, presented in detail with applications for a variety of problems; and * the idea that vision systems could compute space representations different from perfect metric descriptions -- and be used in robotic tasks -- advanced for both artificial and biological systems.

This book presents a variety of perspectives on vision-based applications. These contributions are focused on optoelectronic sensors, 3D & 2D machine vision technologies, robot navigation, control schemes, motion controllers, intelligent algorithms and vision systems. The authors focus on applications of unmanned aerial vehicles, autonomous and mobile robots, industrial inspection applications and structural health monitoring. Recent advanced research in measurement and others areas where 3D & 2D machine vision and machine control play an important role, as well as surveys and reviews about vision-based applications. These topics are of interest to readers from diverse areas, including electrical, electronics and computer engineering, technologists, students and non-specialist readers. • Presents current research in image and signal sensors, methods, and 3D & 2D technologies in vision-based theories and applications; • Discusses applications such as daily use devices including robotics, detection, tracking and stereoscopic vision systems, pose estimation, avoidance of objects, control and data exchange for navigation, and aerial imagery processing; • Includes research contributions in scientific, industrial, and civil applications.

This book features the latest theoretical results and techniques in the field of guidance, navigation, and control (GNC) of vehicles and aircrafts. It covers a wide range of topics, including but not limited to, intelligent computing communication and control; new methods of navigation, estimation and tracking; control of multiple moving objects; manned and autonomous unmanned systems; guidance, navigation and control of miniature aircraft; and sensor systems for guidance, navigation and control etc. Presenting recent advances in the form of illustrations, tables, and text, it also provides detailed information of a number of the studies, to offer readers insights for their own research. In addition, the book addresses fundamental concepts and studies in the development of GNC, making it a valuable resource for both beginners and researchers wanting to further their understanding of guidance, navigation, and control.

The 6-volume set, comprising the LNCS books 12535 until 12540, constitutes the refereed proceedings of 28 out of the 45 workshops held at the 16th European Conference on Computer Vision, ECCV 2020. The conference was planned to take place in Glasgow, UK, during August 23-28, 2020, but changed to a virtual format due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The 249 full papers, 18 short papers, and 21 further contributions included in the workshop proceedings were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 467 submissions. The papers deal with diverse computer vision topics. Part IV focusses on advances in image manipulation; assistive computer vision and robotics; and computer vision for UAVs.

All biological systems with vision move about their environments and successfully perform many tasks. The same capabilities are needed in the world of robots. To that end, recent results in empirical fields that study insects and primates, as well as in theoretical and applied disciplines that design robots, have uncovered a number of the principles of navigation. To offer a unifying approach to the situation, this book brings together ideas from zoology, psychology, neurobiology, mathematics, geometry, computer science, and engineering. It contains theoretical developments that will be essential in future research on the topic -- especially new representations of space with less complexity than Euclidean representations possess. These representations allow biological and artificial systems to compute from images in order to successfully deal with their environments. In this book, the barriers between different disciplines have been smoothed and the workings of vision systems of biological organisms are made clear in computational terms to computer scientists and engineers. At the same time, fundamental principles arising from computational considerations are made clear both to empirical scientists and engineers. Empiricists can generate a number of hypotheses that they could then study through various experiments. Engineers can gain insight for designing robotic systems that perceive aspects of their environment. For the first time, readers will find: * the insect vision system presented in a way that can be understood by computational scientists working in computer vision and engineering; * three complete, working robotic navigation systems presented with all the issues related to their design analyzed in detail; * the beginning of a computational theory of direct perception, as advocated by Gibson, presented in detail with applications for a variety of problems; and * the idea that vision systems could compute space representations different from perfect metric descriptions -- and be used in robotic tasks -- advanced for both artificial and biological systems.

Visual Question Answering (VQA) usually combines visual inputs like image and video with a natural language question concerning the input and generates a natural language answer as the output. This is by nature a multi-disciplinary research problem, involving computer vision (CV), natural language processing (NLP), knowledge representation and reasoning (KR), etc. Further, VQA is an ambitious undertaking, as it must overcome the challenges of general image understanding and the question-answering task, as well as the difficulties entailed by using large-scale databases with mixed-quality inputs. However, with the advent of deep learning (DL) and driven by the existence of advanced techniques in both CV and NLP and the availability of relevant large-scale datasets, we have recently seen enormous strides in VQA, with more systems and promising results emerging. This book provides a comprehensive overview of VQA, covering fundamental theories, models, datasets, and promising future directions. Given its scope, it can be used as a textbook on computer vision and natural language processing, especially for researchers and students in the area of visual question answering. It also highlights the key models used in VQA.

This book presents revised selected papers from the 15th International Forum on Digital TV and Multimedia Communication, IFTC 2018, held in Shanghai, China, in September 2018. The 39 full papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 130 submissions. They were organized in topical sections on image processing; machine learning; quality assessment; telecommunications; video coding; video surveillance; virtual reality.