Probabilistic visual recognition of artificial landmarks for simultaneous localization and mapping

Probabilistic robotics, most often applied to the problem of simultaneous localisation and mapping (SLAM), requires measures of uncertainly to accompany observations of the environment. This paper describes how uncertainly can be characterised for a vision system that locates coloured landmark in a typical laboratory environment. The paper describes a model of the uncertainly in segmentation, the internal camera model and the mounting of the camera on the robot. It =plains the implementation of the system on a laboratory robot, and provides experimental results that show the coherence of the uncertainly model,

Wide-baseline keypoint detection and matching with wide-angle images for vision based localisation

This thesis addresses the problem of detecting and describing the same scene points in different wide-angle images taken by the same camera at different viewpoints. This is a core competency of many vision-based localisation tasks including visual odometry and visual place recognition. Wide-angle cameras have a large field of view that can exceed a full hemisphere, and the images they produce contain severe radial distortion. When compared to traditional narrow field of view perspective cameras, more accurate estimates of camera egomotion can be found using the images obtained with wide-angle cameras. The ability to accurately estimate camera egomotion is a fundamental primitive of visual odometry, and this is one of the reasons for the increased popularity in the use of wide-angle cameras for this task. Their large field of view also enables them to capture images of the same regions in a scene taken at very different viewpoints, and this makes them suited for visual place recognition. However, the ability to estimate the camera egomotion and recognise the same scene in two different images is dependent on the ability to reliably detect and describe the same scene points, or ‘keypoints’, in the images. Most algorithms used for this purpose are designed almost exclusively for perspective images. Applying algorithms designed for perspective images directly to wide-angle images is problematic as no account is made for the image distortion. The primary contribution of this thesis is the development of two novel keypoint detectors, and a method of keypoint description, designed for wide-angle images. Both reformulate the Scale- Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) as an image processing operation on the sphere. As the image captured by any central projection wide-angle camera can be mapped to the sphere, applying these variants to an image on the sphere enables keypoints to be detected in a manner that is invariant to image distortion. Each of the variants is required to find the scale-space representation of an image on the sphere, and they differ in the approaches they used to do this. Extensive experiments using real and synthetically generated wide-angle images are used to validate the two new keypoint detectors and the method of keypoint description. The best of these two new keypoint detectors is applied to vision based localisation tasks including visual odometry and visual place recognition using outdoor wide-angle image sequences. As part of this work, the effect of keypoint coordinate selection on the accuracy of egomotion estimates using the Direct Linear Transform (DLT) is investigated, and a simple weighting scheme is proposed which attempts to account for the uncertainty of keypoint positions during detection. A word reliability metric is also developed for use within a visual ‘bag of words’ approach to place recognition.

Changing pedagogic codes in a class of landscape architects learning 'ecologically sustainable development'

Professional discourse in education has been the focus of research conducted mostly with teachers and professional practitioners but the work of students in the built environment has largely been ignored. This article presents an analysis of students’ visual discourse in the final professional year of a landscape architecture course in Brisbane, Australia. The study has a multi-method design and includes drawings, interviews and documentary materials, but focuses on the drawings in this paper. Using the theory of Bernstein, the analysis considers student representations as interrelations between professional identity and discretionary space for legitimate knowledge formation in landscape planning. It shows a shift in how students persuade the teacher of their expanding views of this field. The discussion of this shift centres on the professional knowledge that students choose rather than need to learn. It points to the differences within a class that a teacher must address in curriculum design in a contemporary professional course.

Vision based control for fixed wing UAVs inspecting locally linear infrastructure using skid-to-turn maneuvers

The following paper proposes a novel application of Skid-to-Turn maneuvers for fixed wing Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) inspecting locally linear infrastructure. Fixed wing UAVs, following the design of manned aircraft, commonly employ Bank-to-Turn ma- neuvers to change heading and thus direction of travel. Whilst effective, banking an aircraft during the inspection of ground based features hinders data collection, with body fixed sen- sors angled away from the direction of turn and a panning motion induced through roll rate that can reduce data quality. By adopting Skid-to-Turn maneuvers, the aircraft can change heading whilst maintaining wings level flight, thus allowing body fixed sensors to main- tain a downward facing orientation. An Image-Based Visual Servo controller is developed to directly control the position of features as captured by onboard inspection sensors. This improves on the indirect approach taken by other tracking controllers where a course over ground directly above the feature is assumed to capture it centered in the field of view. Performance of the proposed controller is compared against that of a Bank-to-Turn tracking controller driven by GPS derived cross track error in a simulation environment developed to replicate the field of view of a body fixed camera.

Examination of pencil beam predictions of small-field dose using dosimetry film and Monte Carlo simulations

The iPlan treatment planning sys-tem uses a pencil beam algorithm, with density cor-rections, to predict the doses delivered by very small (stereotactic) radiotherapy fields. This study tests the accuracy of dose predictions made by iPlan, for small-field treatments delivered to a planar solid wa-ter phantom and to heterogeneous human tissue using the BrainLAB m3 micro-multileaf collimator.

Dynamic visual features for audio-visual speaker verification

The cascading appearance-based (CAB) feature extraction technique has established itself as the state-of-the-art in extracting dynamic visual speech features for speech recognition. In this paper, we will focus on investigating the effectiveness of this technique for the related speaker verification application. By investigating the speaker verification ability of each stage of the cascade we will demonstrate that the same steps taken to reduce static speaker and environmental information for the visual speech recognition application also provide similar improvements for visual speaker recognition. A further study is conducted comparing synchronous HMM (SHMM) based fusion of CAB visual features and traditional perceptual linear predictive (PLP) acoustic features to show that higher complexity inherit in the SHMM approach does not appear to provide any improvement in the final audio-visual speaker verification system over simpler utterance level score fusion.

Component reliability estimations without field data

Maintenance activities in a large-scale engineering system are usually scheduled according to the lifetimes of various components in order to ensure the overall reliability of the system. Lifetimes of components can be deduced by the corresponding probability distributions with parameters estimated from past failure data. While failure data of the components is not always readily available, the engineers have to be content with the primitive information from the manufacturers only, such as the mean and standard deviation of lifetime, to plan for the maintenance activities. In this paper, the moment-based piecewise polynomial model (MPPM) are proposed to estimate the parameters of the reliability probability distribution of the products when only the mean and standard deviation of the product lifetime are known. This method employs a group of polynomial functions to estimate the two parameters of the Weibull Distribution according to the mathematical relationship between the shape parameter of two-parameters Weibull Distribution and the ratio of mean and standard deviation. Tests are carried out to evaluate the validity and accuracy of the proposed methods with discussions on its suitability of applications. The proposed method is particularly useful for reliability-critical systems, such as railway and power systems, in which the maintenance activities are scheduled according to the expected lifetimes of the system components.

Thomas Young's contribution to visual optics : the Bakerian lecture "On the mechanism of the eye"

Thomas Young (1773-1829) carried out major pioneering work in many different subjects. In 1800 he gave the Bakerian Lecture of the Royal Society on the topic of the “mechanism of the eye”: this was published in the following year (Young, 1801). Young used his own design of optometer to measure refraction and accommodation, and discovered his own astigmatism. He considered the different possible origins of accommodation and confirmed that it was due to change in shape of the lens rather than to change in shape of the cornea or an increase in axial length. However, the paper also dealt with many other aspects of visual and ophthalmic optics, such as biometric parameters, peripheral refraction, longitudinal chromatic aberration, depth-of-focus and instrument myopia. These aspects of the paper have previously received little attention. We now give detailed consideration to these and other less-familiar features of Young’s work and conclude that his studies remain relevant to many of the topics which currently engage visual scientists.