Visual sensing in robotics, especially in the context of autonomous vehicles, has advanced quickly and many important contributions have been made in the areas of target classification. Typical to these studies is the use of the Red-Green-Blue (RGB) camera. Separately, in the field of remote sensing, the hyperspectral camera has been used to perform classification tasks on natural and man-made objects from typically aerial or satellite platforms. Hyperspectral data is characterized by a very fine spectral resolution, resulting in a significant increase in the ability to identify materials in the image. This hardware has not been studied in the context of autonomy as the sensors are large, expensive, and have non-trivial image capture times.
This work presents three novel contributions: a Labeled Hyperspectral Image Dataset (LHID) of ground-level, outdoor objects based on typical scenes that a vehicle or pedestrian may encounter, an open-source hyperspectral interface software package (HSImage), and a feature selection based sensor design algorithm for object detection sensors (DLSD). These three contributions are novel and useful in the fields of hyperspectral data analysis, visual sensor design, and hyperspectral machine learning. The hyperspectral dataset and hyperspectral interface software were used in the design and testing of the sensor design algorithm.
The LHID is shown to be useful for machine learning tasks through experimentation and provides a unique data source for hyperspectral machine learning. HSImage is shown to be useful for manipulating, labeling and interacting with hyperspectral data, and allows wavelength and classification based data retrieval, storage of labeling information and ambient light data. DLSD is shown to be useful for creating wavelength bands for a sensor design that increase the accuracy of classifiers trained on data from the LHID. DLSD shows accuracy near that of the full spectrum hyperspectral data, with a reduction in features on the order of 100 times. It compared favorably to other state-of-the-art wavelength feature selection techniques and exceeded the accuracy of an RGB sensor by 10%. / Ph. D. / To allow for better performance of autonomous vehicles in the complex road environment, identifying different objects in the roadway or near it is very important. Typically, cameras are used to identify objects and there has been much research into this task. However, the type of camera used is an RGB camera, the same used in consumer electronics, and it has a limited ability to identify colors. Instead, it only detects red, green, and blue and combines the results of these three measurements to simulate color. Hyperspectral cameras are specialized hardware that can detect individual colors, without having to simulate them. This study details an algorithm that will design a sensor for autonomous vehicle object identification that leverages the higher amount of information in a hyperspectral camera, but keep the simpler hardware of the RGB camera.
This study presents three separate novel contributions: A database of hyperspectral images useful for tasks related to autonomous vehicles, a software tool that allows scientific study of hyperspectral images, and an algorithm that provides a sensor design that is useful for object identification.
Experiments using the database show that it is useful for research tasks related to autonomous vehicles. The software tool is shown to be useful to interfacing between image files, algorithms and external software, and the sensor design algorithm is shown to be comparable to other such algorithms in accuracy, but outperforms the other algorithms in the size of the data required to complete the goal.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VTETD/oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/84944 |
| Date | 31 August 2018 |
| Creators | Brown, Ryan Charles |
| Contributors | Mechanical Engineering, Wicks, Alfred L., Asbeck, Alan T., Roan, Michael J., Tokekar, Pratap, Abbott, A. Lynn |
| Publisher | Virginia Tech |
| Source Sets | Virginia Tech Theses and Dissertation |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Dissertation |
| Format | ETD, application/pdf, application/pdf |
| Rights | In Copyright, http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ |
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