Panoramic
video sequence and the corresponding mosaic in a VRML format (from [Galego10]).
MSc dissertation proposal 2010/2011
Panoramic
Tourist: Building and Using Virtual Scenes
Introduction:
The panoramic tourist is a device that helps a
human-tourist to identify points of interest in a panoramic scene.
The panoramic tourist if based on a mobile pan and tilt video camera, operated
by the human-tourist. The camera is firstly installed by sweeping the full
range of pan and tilt angles, from which it is created automatically a panorama
of the scene. The panorama of the scene is then labelled (off-line) by an
expert. Finally, while in operation, the human-tourists take advantage of the
knowledge saved in the device, by pointing the camera to specific locations and
receiving the related information.
Supervision: Prof. José Gaspar.
Objectives:
This project involves three main objectives: (i)
composing a
mosaic from a pan-tilt video sweeping a spherical scene surrounding
the camera, (ii) estimating the pan-tilt angles from image features matching, and
(iii) associating
touristic events to the current image.
Detailed description:
Using pan and tilt cameras to build virtual scene representations in the
form of mosaics is subject well explored in literature [Sinha04, Vitorino07,
Galego10]. Panoramic (spherical) virtual representations are actually being
progressively introduced in various markets such as real estate promotion,
testing architectural and ergonomic solutions, or virtual visiting to tourist
and cultural places.
In this project we propose building the "Panoramic Tourist"
device. The "Panoramic Tourist" is a device that helps a real
human-tourist to identify points of interest in a panoramic scene. It is based
on a mobile pan-tilt camera which is used to construct a virtual scene in the
form of a mosaic of images. This mosaic of images is therefore labelled by an
expert with the touristic points of interest. The pan-tilt camera is finally
used by the tourists in a "point and shoot", information presenting,
operating mode.
Building the virtual scenes by composing mosaics involves carefully
registering images having large overlapping among them. The precise
registration either involves precise geometric calibration and the pan and tilt
angular information, or precise estimation of mapping homographies. This is an
important aspect to study in the project. In either of the cases it is
interesting to use just video information to understand whether or not it can
complement or even replace the (control electronics / odometry)
measurements of the camera pose.
The work is organized in the following main parts:
1) Compose a mosaic from a pan-tilt video sweeping a spherical scene
surrounding the camera
2) Estimating the pan-tilt camera pose from the correlation / matching
of image features
3) Associating events to the current image, based on the estimated
pan-tilt pose of the camera
References:
[Sinha04] "Towards Calibrating a Pan-Tilt-Zoom Camera Network",
[Vitorino07] "Panoramic Mosaics Minimizing Overlappings in the Azimuthal
Field-of-View", João Vitorino,
José Gaspar, Proc. of RecPad 2007 - 13ª Conferência Portuguesa de Reconhecimento
de Padrões,
[Vicente09] "Assessing Control Modalities
Designed for Pan-Tilt Surveillance Cameras", Diogo
Vicente, Jacinto C. Nascimento, José Gaspar, RecPad 2009.
[Galego10] "Surveillance with Pan-Tilt Cameras: Background Modeling", Ricardo Galego, Alexandre Bernardino, José Gaspar, In 16th Portuguese
Conference on Pattern Recognition (RecPad 2010), Vila
Real, Portugal, October 2010.
Expected results:
At the end of the work the students will have enriched their knowledge
in:
* Computer vision
* Virtual scenarios construction
Observations:
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More MSc dissertation
proposals on Computer and Robot Vision in:
http://omni.isr.ist.utl.pt/~jag