Engineering Commons^™

Model-Based Control Using Model And Mechanization Fusion Techniques For Image-Aided Navigation, Constance D. Hendrix

Theses and Dissertations

Unmanned aerial vehicles are no longer used for just reconnaissance. Current requirements call for smaller autonomous vehicles that replace the human in high-risk activities. Many times these activities are performed in GPS-degraded environments. Without GPS providing today's most accurate navigation solution, autonomous navigation in tight areas is more difficult. Today, image-aided navigation is used and other methods are explored to more accurately navigate in such areas (e.g., indoors). This thesis explores the use of inertial measurements and navigation solution updates using cameras with a model-based Linear Quadratic Gaussian controller. To demonstrate the methods behind this research, the controller will provide …

Communication Free Robot Swarming, Zachary C. Gray

Theses and Dissertations

As the military use of unmanned aerial vehicles increases, a growing need for novel strategies to control these systems exists. One such method for controlling many unmanned aerial vehicles simultaneously is the through the use of swarm algorithms. This research explores a swarm robotic algorithm developed by Kadrovach implemented on Pioneer Robots in a real-world environment. An adaptation of his visual sensor is implemented using stereo vision as the primary method of sensing the environment. The swarm members are prohibited from explicitly communicating other than passively through the environment. The resulting implementation produces a communication free swarming algorithm. The algorithm …

A Subspace Projection Methodology For Nonlinear Manifold Based Face Recognition, Praveen Sankaran

Electrical & Computer Engineering Theses & Dissertations

A novel feature extraction method that utilizes nonlinear mapping from the original data space to the feature space is presented in this dissertation. Feature extraction methods aim to find compact representations of data that are easy to classify. Measurements with similar values are grouped to same category, while those with differing values are deemed to be of separate categories. For most practical systems, the meaningful features of a pattern class lie in a low dimensional nonlinear constraint region (manifold) within the high dimensional data space. A learning algorithm to model this nonlinear region and to project patterns to this feature …

Vision-Based Detection, Tracking And Classification Of Vehicles Using Stable Features With Automatic Camera Calibration, Neeraj Kanhere

All Dissertations

A method is presented for segmenting and tracking vehicles on highways using a camera that is relatively low to the ground. At such low angles, 3D perspective effects cause significant appearance changes over time, as well as severe occlusions by vehicles in neighboring lanes. Traditional approaches to occlusion reasoning assume that the vehicles initially appear well-separated in the image, but in our sequences it is not uncommon for vehicles to enter the scene partially occluded and remain so throughout. By utilizing a 3D perspective mapping from the scene to the image, along with a plumb line projection, a subset of …

Real-Time Forward Urban Environment Perception For An Autonomous Ground Vehicle Using Computer Vision And Lidar, Christopher Richard Greco

Theses and Dissertations

The field of autonomous vehicle research is growing rapidly. The Congressional mandate for the military to use unmanned vehicles has, in large part, sparked this growth. In conjunction with this mandate, DARPA sponsored the Urban Challenge, a competition to create fully autonomous vehicles that can operate in urban settings. An extremely important feature of autonomous vehicles, especially in urban locations, is their ability to perceive their environment. The research presented in this thesis is directed toward providing an autonomous vehicle with real-time data that efficiently and compactly represents its forward environment as it navigates an urban area. The information extracted …

Particle Filter Based Mosaicking For Forest Fire Tracking, Justin Mathew Bradley

Theses and Dissertations

Using autonomous miniature air vehicles (MAVs) is a cost-effective, simple method for collecting data about the size, shape, and location characteristics of a forest fire. However, noise in measurements used to compute pose (location and attitude) of the on-board camera leads to significant errors in the processing of collected video data. Typical methods using MAVs to track fires attempt to find single geolocation estimates and filter that estimate with subsequent observations. While this is an effective method of resolving the noise to achieve a better geolocation estimate, it reduces a fire to a single point or small set of points. …

Obstacle Avoidance For Small Unmanned Air Vehicles, Brandon R. Call

Theses and Dissertations

Small UAVs are used for low altitude surveillance flights where unknown obstacles can be encountered. These UAVs can be given the capability to navigate in uncertain environments if obstacles are identified. This research presents an obstacle avoidance system for small UAVs. First, a mission waypoint path is created that avoids all known obstacles using a genetic algorithm. Then, while the UAV is in flight, obstacles are detected using a forward looking, onboard camera. Image features are found using the Harris Corner Detector and tracked through multiple video frames which provides three dimensional localization of the features. A sparse three dimensional …

Structure From Motion Using Optical Flow Probability Distributions, Paul Clark Merrell

Theses and Dissertations

Several novel structure from motion algorithms are presented that are designed to more effectively manage the problem of noise. In many practical applications, structure from motion algorithms fail to work properly because of the noise in the optical flow values. Most structure from motion algorithms implicitly assume that the noise is identically distributed and that the noise is white. Both assumptions are false. Some points can be track more easily than others and some points can be tracked more easily in a particular direction. The accuracy of each optical flow value can be quantified using an optical flow probability distribution. …

Determination Of Structure From Motion Using Aerial Imagery, Paul R. Graham

Theses and Dissertations

The structure from motion process creates three-dimensional models from a sequence of images. Until recently, most research in this field has been restricted to land-based imagery. This research examines the current methods of land-based structure from motion and evaluates their performance for aerial imagery. Current structure from motion algorithms search the initial image for features to track though the subsequent images. These features are used to create point correspondences between the two images. The correspondences are used to estimate the motion of the camera and then the three-dimensional structure of the scene. This research tests current algorithms using synthetic data …

Discovering The Merit Of The Wavelet Transform For Object Classification, Matthew D. Eyster

Theses and Dissertations

Vision is the primary sense by which most biological systems collect information about their environment. Computer vision is a branch of artificial intelligence concerned with endowing machines with the ability to understand images. Object recognition is a key part of machine vision with far reaching benefits ranging from target recognition, surveillance systems, to automation systems. Extraction of salient features from an image is one of the key steps in object recognition. Typically, geometric primitives are extracted from an image using local analysis. However, the wavelet transform provides a global approach with good locality. Additionally, the directional and multiresolution properties may …

Realtime Color Stereovision Processing, Byron P. Formwalt

Theses and Dissertations

Recent developments in aviation have made micro air vehicles (MAVs) a reality. These featherweight palm-sized radio-controlled flying saucers embody the future of air-to-ground combat. No one has ever successfully implemented an autonomous control system for MAVs. Because MAVs are physically small with limited energy supplies, video signals offer superiority over radar for navigational applications. This research takes a step forward in real time machine vision processing. It investigates techniques for implementing a real time stereovision processing system using two miniature color cameras. The effects of poor-quality optics are overcome by a robust algorithm, which operates in real time and achieves …

Adaptive Color Correlation Of Knots In Wood Images And Weighted-Value Product Selection Methods In A Machine Vision System, John Robert Goulding

Dissertations and Theses

The biggest obstacle to robust color image processing of wood is in developing a color model that represents all possible defect colors. When the color model is too general or too specific, defect recognition fails because too many or too few non-defect pixels match the model, respectively. Because a color image of wood contains far more clear and clear-grain colored pixels than grain-knot and knot colored pixels, it is beneficial to first statistically identify and remove the clear and clear-grain colors and to use the accumulated data to simultaneously enhance and normalize the remaining grainknot and knot colored pixels. This …

An Implementation Of A Versatile Camera Calibration Technique For High-Accuracy 3d Machine Vision Metrology Using Off-The-Shelf Tv Camera And Lenses, Bolang Li

Theses

This thesis studies and implements a new versatile camera calibration technique for high-accuracy 3D machine vision metrology using off-the-shelf TV camera and lenses developed by Roger Tsai [1]. This technique builds up a unique relationship from the world coordinate system to the computer image coordinate system of calibration points by using a radial alignment constraint. The technique has advantage in terms of accuracy, speed, and versatility over existing techniques.

The fundamental knowledge for using this technique is presented in this thesis first, followed by an overview of the existing calibration techniques, and a detailed description of the new technique. The …

Automatic Infrared And Visual Inspection Of Solder Joints On Pcbs, Jiang Huang

Theses

This thesis reports the research results of automatic inspection of solder joints on printed circuit boards (PCBs). The previous work on this regard has been advanced significantly in the following three aspects. With the application of some microlens and the principle of geometric optics solder joints of real size are inspected in this work instead of larger simulation solder joints in the previous work. A new set of features is formulated and used for infrared inspection. Consequently, better results have been achieved in this work.

Reasonably good results demonstrate the capability of infrared inspection of solder joints on PCBs. Once …

Direct Recovering Of Composite Surface Using Uoff, Zhesheng Huang

Theses

The research work reported in the thesis is motivated by the problem raised in the computer vision area. It utilizes direct method to recover surface structure of objects in 3-D space from a pair of stereo images. The direct method, compared with optical flow-based approach and feature-based approach, is robust and computationally efficient. However it can only recover planar surface structure so far. A new approach to recover structure from a pair of stereo images based on unified optical flow field (UOFF) is developed recently. It can recover curved surface structure.

In this thesis, the problem of recovering surface structure …

3-D Structure Recovery Using Unified Optical Flow Field Approach, Anees Ahmad

Theses

Recovery of the 3-D structure that is characterized by an N^th order factorable and/or non-factorable polynomial equation is studied in this thesis. Analytical tools have been employed to analyze and solve the problem. The solution is based on the direct method, which is derived from the unified optical flow field, which, in turn, is an extension of optical flow to spatial image sequences. Least squares formulation has been employed for optimum estimation. The method used does not require the establishment of point to point correspondence, nor the estimation of the optical flow, as an intermediate step.

The theoretical results …

A Machine Vision System With Remote Host, Chieyeon Jason Chen

Theses

The modem plays an important role in data communication using the Public Swiched Telephone Network. In this thesis, the modem function is merged into a low cost machine vision system based on the Motorola 68HC11. Evalation Board The system comprises the intelligent machine vision con- troller and a remotely located host computer, such as an IBM-PC. It, supports extra long distance communication capability so that the controller and the host can be anywhere in the world where then is a telephone line. Because of the limit of a 2100 bps modem, soft ware data compression is implemented here to save …

Estimating 3-D Motion And Structure Parameters Of A Rigid Planar Object By Establishing Landmark Correspondences, Herman Agustiawan

Theses

The application of a landmark based approach in recognizing 3-D rigid planar objects[3] along with two different motion and structure estimation algorithm [21][23] have been studied to perform motion and structure estimation tasks of moving objects. The recognition algorithm is based on a sphericity value derived from affine transformation that maps feature points in the object under observation from first to second view in the 2-D image space. The motion and structure estimation algorithm is based on a unique mapping given four or more feature point correspondences.

More than ten experiments have been done including small and large rigid motions. …