Construction and Calibration of a Bio-Inspired Camera

Eyes and possible machine counterparts (from [Neumann05])

MSc dissertation proposal 2012/2013

Construction and Calibration of a Bio-Inspired Camera

Introduction:

Bio-inspired cameras simply combine pixels in a fixed manner but without a specific arrangement. Bio-inspired cameras are interesting for robotic applications due to allowing designs specific to the tasks at hand [Neumann05], but pose a challenge right from the calibration point.

Recent research work has shown that bio-inspired cameras, which can be moved freely and have a central arrangement of the pixels, can be calibrated from natural scenes [Grossmann10]. This MSc project focuses on building and calibrating a bio-inspired camera.

Note: this project is proposed in the framework of a national project on camera modelling and calibration, DCCAL.

Objectives:

In this work the objectives are two fold: (i) assembling a bio-inspired camera using standard components in the market, (ii) calibrating the camera.

Detailed description:

Conventional video cameras are built from CCD or CMOS sensors whose pixels are organized in rectangular grids. Determining the intrinsic parameters of a mobile camera without any assumptions about the imaged world is called camera self- or auto-calibration [Hassanpour04]. More commonly, cameras are static and one shows them a planar structured (chess) calibration pattern in various poses, which is enough to perform the calibration [Bouguet-WWW].

The construction of the camera will be based on a standard camera and a standard lens. In between the camera and the lens one will insert a collection of optical fibbers, rigidly glued to each other [Neumann05].

In this work proposal is expected to test a number of referred calibration methodologies. The testing methodology will be first based on simulation and in some cases using real cameras, namely cameras hand-held or pan-tilt-zoom mounted on static basis or on mobile robots.

The main steps of the work are therefore the following:

- build a simulated camera that allow acquiring data to calibrate the camera

- testing the calibration of the simulated camera

- assembling the bio-inspired central camera

- calibrating the assembled camera

References:

[Bouguet-WWW] Jean-Yves Bouguet, "Camera calibration toolbox for matlab", http://www.vision.caltech.edu/bouguetj/calib_doc/

[Hassanpour04] Camera auto-calibration using a sequence of 2D images with small rotations, Reza Hassanpour, Volkan Atalay, Pattern Recognition Letters, Vol.25, Issue 9, 2 July 2004, Pages 989-997

[Agapito01] Agapito, L., Hayman, E., Reid, I.D., 2001. Self calibration of rotating and zooming cameras. Int. J. Comput. Vision 45(2), 107–127.

[Neumann05] "Compound Eye Sensor for 3D Ego Motion Estimation", Jan Neumann, Cornelia Fermuller, Yiannis Aloimonos, Vladimir Brajovic, IROS 2005, see also http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.147.929

[Grossmann10] "Discrete camera calibration from pixel streams", Etienne Grossmann, José António Gaspar and Francesco Orabona, Computer Vision and Image Understanding (Special issue on Omnidirectional Vision, Camera Networks and Non-conventional Cameras), Volume 114, Issue 2, Pages 198-209, February 2010.

Requirements (grades, required courses, etc):

Expected results:

At the end of the work, the students will have enriched their experience in computer vision. In particular are expected to develop and assess:

- algorithms for calibrating central cameras.

Place for conducting the work-proposal:

ISR / IST

More MSc dissertation proposals on Computer and Robot Vision in:

http://omni.isr.ist.utl.pt/~jag