IREE: Automated Vision Tracking of Project Related Entities

The purpose of this supplemental project was to collect invaluable data from the large-scale construction sites of Egnatia Odos motorway needed to validate a novel automated vision-tracking method created under the parent grant. For this purpose, one US graduate and three US undergraduate students traveled to Greece for 4 months and worked together with 2 Greek graduate students of the local faculty collaborator. This team of students monitored project activities and scheduled data collection trips on a daily basis, setup a mobile video data collection lab on the back of a truck, and drove to various sites every day to collect hundreds of hours of video from multiple cameras on a large variety of activities ranging from soil excavation to bridge construction. The US students were underrepresented students from minority groups who had never visited a foreign country. As a result, this trip was a major life experience to them. They learned how to live in a non-English speaking country, communicate with Greek students, workers and engineers. They lead a project in a very unfamiliar environment, troubleshoot myriad problems that hampered their progress daily and, above all, how to collaborate effectively and efficiently with other cultures. They returned to the US more mature, with improved leadership and problem-solving skills and a wider perspective of their profession.

Pixel-level tunable liquid crystal lenses for auto-stereoscopic display

Mobile video and gaming are now widely used, and delivery of a glass-free 3D experience is of both research and development interest. The key drawbacks of a conventional 3D display based on a static lenticular lenslet array and parallax barriers are low resolution, limited viewing angle and reduced brightness, mainly because of the need of multiple-pixels for each object point. This study describes the concept and performance of pixel-level cylindrical liquid crystal (LC) lenses, which are designed to steer light to the left and right eye sequentially to form stereo parallax. The width of the LC lenses can be as small as 20-30 μm, so that the associated auto-stereoscopic display will have the same resolution as the 2D display panel in use. Such a thin sheet of tunable LC lens array can be applied directly on existing mobile displays, and can deliver 3D viewing experience while maintaining 2D viewing capability. Transparent electrodes were laser patterned to achieve the single pixel lens resolution, and a high birefringent LC material was used to realise a large diffraction angle for a wide field of view. Simulation was carried out to model the intensity profile at the viewing plane and optimise the lens array based on the measured LC phase profile. The measured viewing angle and intensity profile were compared with the simulation results. © 2014 SPIE.