The ability to detect crop rows and release sensors in large areas to ensure homogeneous coverage is crucial to monitor and increase the yield of crop rows. Aerial robotics in the agriculture field helps to reduce soil compaction. We report a release mechanics system based on image processing for crop row detection, which is essential for field navigation-based machine vision since most plants grow in a row. The release mechanics system is fully automated using embedded hardware and operated from a UAV. Once the crop row is detected, the release mechanics system releases lightweight, flexible multi-sensory devices on top of each plant to monitor the humidity and temperature conditions. The capability to monitor the local environmental conditions of plants can have a high impact on enhancing the plant’s health and in creasing the output of agriculture. The proposed algorithm steps: image acquisition, image processing, and line detection. First, we select the Region of Interest (ROI) from the frame, transform it to grayscale, remove noise, and then skeletonize and remove the background. Next, apply a Hough transform to detect crop rows and filter the lines. Finally, we use the Kalman filter to predict the crop row line in the next frame to improve the performance. This work’s main contribution is the release mechanism integrated with embedded hardware with a high-performance crop row detection algorithm for field navigation. The experimental results show the algorithm’s performance achieved a high accuracy of 90% of images with resolutions of (900x470) the speed reached 2 Frames Per Second (FPS).

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A system capable of adjusting a computer vision system to unpredictable ambient lighting has been designed and attached to a silhouette robot vision system. Its principle of operation is based on the generation and analysis of the distribution of light in one T.V. frame. Designed to be used in robot vision applications, high speed processing of data is achieved in the system to generate a histogram of grey levels in one frame time. An addressable RAM technique for this purpose is explained. The system obtains two threshold values from the histogram of grey levels and places them into a threshold logic unit. A silhouette from a grey level picture is obtained as the result of the process. Adaptability of the system is performed by using different integration times in the read out of the visual transducer. The implementation of the system is based on a video rate histogram generator, a sensitivity control unit, a DMA circuit, an 86/12A microcomputer and a solid state T.V. camera. A graphics printer is used to print out results and a CRT terminal to communicate with the microcomputer. The custom hardware and software implementations for the system are depicted in detail. / Thesis / Master of Engineering (ME)

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An automated vision system performs critical tasks in video surveillance, while decreasing costs and increasing efficiency. It can provide high quality scene monitoring without the limitations of human distraction and fatigue. Advances in embedded processors, wireless networks, and imager technology have enabled computer vision systems to be deployed pervasively in stationary surveillance monitors, hand-held devices, and vehicular sensors. However, the size, weight, power, and cost requirements of these platforms present a great challenge in developing real-time systems. This dissertation explores the development of background modeling algorithms for surveillance on embedded platforms. Our contributions are as follows: - An efficient pixel-based adaptive background model, called multimodal mean, which produces results comparable to the widely used mixture of Gaussians multimodal approach, at a much reduced computational cost and greater control of occluded object persistence. - A novel and efficient chromatic clustering-based background model for embedded vision platforms that leverages the color uniformity of large, permanent background objects to yield significant speedups in execution time. - A multi-scale temporal model for midground analysis which provides a means to "tune-in" to changes in the scene beyond the standard background/foreground framework, based on user-defined temporal constraints. Multimodal mean reduces instruction complexity with the use of fixed integer arithmetic and periodic long-term adaptation that occurs once every d frames. When combined with fixed thresholding, it performs 6.2 times faster than the mixture of Gaussians method while using 18% less storage. Furthermore, fixed thresholding compares favorably to standard deviation thresholding with a percentage difference in error less than five percent when used on scenes with stable lighting conditions and modest multimodal activity. The chromatic clustering-based approach to optimized background modeling takes advantage of the color distributions in large permanent background objects, such as a road, building, or sidewalk, to speedup execution time. It abstracts their colors to a small color palette and suppresses their adaptation during processing. When run on a representative embedded platform it reduces storage usage by 58% and increases runtime execution by 45%. Multiscale temporal modeling for midground analysis presents a unified approach for scene analysis that can be applied to several application domains. It extends scene analysis from the standard background/foreground framework to one that includes a temporal midground object saliency window that is defined by the user. When applied to stationary object detection, the midground model provides accurate results at low sampling frame rates (~ 1 fps) while using only 18 Mbytes of storage and 15 Mops/sec processing throughput.

<p></p><p>Augmented Reality (AR) is a powerful computer to human visual interface that displays data overlaid onto the user's view of the real world. Compared to conventional visualization on a computer display, AR has the advantage of saving the user the cognitive effort of mapping the visualization to the real world. For example, a user wearing AR glasses can find a destination in an urban setting by following a virtual green line drawn by the AR system on the sidewalk, which is easier to do than having to rely on navigational directions displayed on a phone. Similarly, a surgeon looking at an operating field through an AR display can see graphical annotations authored by a remote mentor as if the mentor actually drew on the patient's body.</p> <p> </p> <p>However, several challenges remain to be addressed before AR can reach its full potential. This research contributes solutions to four such challenges. A first challenge is achieving visualization continuity for AR displays. Since truly transparent displays are not feasible, AR relies on simulating transparency by showing a live video on a conventional display. For correct transparency, the display should show exactly what the user would see if the display were not there. Since the video is not captured from the user viewpoint, simply displaying each frame as acquired results in visualization discontinuity and redundancy. A second challenge is providing the remote mentor with an effective visualization of the mentee's workspace in AR telementoring. Acquiring the workspace with a camera built into the mentee's AR headset is appealing since it captures the workspace from the mentee's viewpoint, and since it does not require external hardware. However, the workspace visualization is unstable as it changes frequently, abruptly, and substantially with each mentee head motion. A third challenge is occluder removal in diminished reality. Whereas in conventional AR the user's visualization of a real world scene is augmented with graphical annotations, diminished reality aims to aid the user's understanding of complex real world scenes by removing objects from the visualization. The challenge is to paint over occluder pixels using auxiliary videos acquired from different viewpoints, in real time, and with good visual quality. A fourth challenge is to acquire scene geometry from the user viewpoint, as needed in AR, for example, to integrate virtual annotations seamlessly into the real world scene through accurate depth compositing, and shadow and reflection casting and receiving.</p> <p> </p> <p>Our solutions are based on the thesis that images acquired from different viewpoints should not always be connected by computing a dense, per-pixel set of correspondences, but rather by devising custom, lightweight, yet sufficient connections between them, for each unique context. We have developed a self-contained phone-based AR display that aligns the phone camera and the user by views, reducing visualization discontinuity to less than 5% for scene distances beyond 5m. We have developed and validated in user studies an effective workspace visualization method by stabilizing the mentee first-person video feed through reprojection on a planar proxy of the workspace. We have developed a real-time occluder in-painting method for diminished reality based on a two-stage coarse-then-fine mapping between the user and the auxiliary view. The mapping is established in time linear with occluder contour length, and it achieves good continuity across the occluder boundary. We have developed a method for 3D scene acquisition from the user viewpoint based on single-image triangulation of correspondences between left and right eye corneal reflections. The method relies on a subpixel accurate calibration of the catadioptric imaging system defined by two corneas and a camera, which enables the extension of conventional epipolar geometry for a fast connection between corneal reflections.</p><p></p>

A procedure of multispectral analysis was developed to classify a two category image. The procedure utilized pattern recognition and feature extraction techniques. Images were acquired using a computer vision system with a series of interference filters to limit the wavelength band of the images. The procedure developed for multispectral analysis is: (1) Filter selection and image acquisition. (2) Pattern recognition. (3) Bayes minimum error rate classification. (4) Feature extraction by Fisher transformation or by Hotelling transformation. The analytical procedure was programmed in Microsoft C computer language and implemented on an IBM AT computer. The system was tested by identifying an apple against a Formica background. The classified images and histograms indicated that the separation was possible.

The success of many computer vision problems and machine learning algorithms critically depends on the quality of the chosen distance metrics or similarity functions. Due to the fact that the real-data at hand is inherently task- and data-dependent, learning an appropriate distance metric or similarity function from data for each specific task is usually superior to the default Euclidean distance or cosine similarity. This thesis mainly focuses on developing new metric and similarity learning models for three tasks: unconstrained face verification, person re-identification and kNN classification. Unconstrained face verification is a binary matching problem, the target of which is to predict whether two images/videos are from the same person or not. Concurrently, person re-identification handles pedestrian matching and ranking across non-overlapping camera views. Both vision problems are very challenging because of the large transformation differences in images or videos caused by pose, expression, occlusion, problematic lighting and viewpoint. To address the above concerns, two novel methods are proposed. Firstly, we introduce a new dimensionality reduction method called Intra-PCA by considering the robustness to large transformation differences. We show that Intra-PCA significantly outperforms the classic dimensionality reduction methods (e.g. PCA and LDA). Secondly, we propose a novel regularization framework called Sub-SML to learn distance metrics and similarity functions for unconstrained face verifica- tion and person re-identification. The main novelty of our formulation is to incorporate both the robustness of Intra-PCA to large transformation variations and the discriminative power of metric and similarity learning, a property that most existing methods do not hold. Working with the task of kNN classification which relies a distance metric to identify the nearest neighbors, we revisit some popular existing methods for metric learning and develop a general formulation called DMLp for learning a distance metric from data. To obtain the optimal solution, a gradient-based optimization algorithm is proposed which only needs the computation of the largest eigenvector of a matrix per iteration. Although there is a large number of studies devoted to metric/similarity learning based on different objective functions, few studies address the generalization analysis of such methods. We describe a novel approch for generalization analysis of metric/similarity learning which can deal with general matrix regularization terms including the Frobenius norm, sparse L1-norm, mixed (2, 1)-norm and trace-norm. The novel models developed in this thesis are evaluated on four challenging databases: the Labeled Faces in the Wild dataset for unconstrained face verification in still images; the YouTube Faces database for video-based face verification in the wild; the Viewpoint Invariant Pedestrian Recognition database for person re-identification; the UCI datasets for kNN classification. Experimental results show that the proposed methods yield competitive or state-of-the-art performance.

published_or_final_version / Computer Science / Master / Master of Philosophy