Many telepresence robots are equipped with a forward-facing camera for video communication and a downward-facing camera for navigation. In this paper, we propose to stitch videos from the FF-camera with a wide-angle lens and the DF-camera with a fisheye lens for telepresence robots. We aim at providing more compact and efficient visual feedback for the user interface of telepresence robots with user-friendly interactive experiences. To this end, we present a multi-homography-based video stitching method which stitches videos from a wide-angle camera and a fisheye camera. The method consists of video image alignment, seam cutting, and image blending. We directly align the wide-angle video image and the fisheye video image based on the multi-homography alignment without calibration, distortion correction, and unwarping procedures. Thus, we can obtain a stitched video with shape preservation in the non-overlapping regions and alignment in the overlapping area for telepresence. To alleviate ghosting effects caused by moving objects and or moving cameras during telepresence robot driving, an optimal seam is found for aligned video composition, and the optimal seam will be updated in subsequent frames, considering spatial and temporal coherence. The final stitched video is created by image blending based on the optimal seam. We conducted a user study to demonstrate the effectiveness of our method and the superiority of telepresence robots with a stitched video as visual feedback.
The alignment of wide-angle images and or fisheye images is more challenging, and suffers from heavy radial distortion @cite_37 . In order for bringing wide-angle images into alignment, Jin @cite_14 and Byr " @cite_17 estimated jointly the lens distortion and the alignment transformation, assuming that all images share the same distortion factors. For cameras in different radial distortions, Ju and Kang @cite_1 estimated the lens distortion factor for each image, and then computed a homography for the alignment of synthetic images, whereas @cite_2 estimated a homography and different distortion factors to bring images of real scene into alignment. In addition, Ho and Budagavi @cite_18 proposed to align two images captured by a dual-fisheye lens camera. They unwarped the fisheye images into spherical 2-Dimensional space, and then employed a two-step alignment to register the unwarped images. Due to the unwarping process, the regions near edges of original images are stretched, leading to shape distortions in alignment results.
@cite_37 @cite_14 @cite_18 @cite_1 @cite_2 @cite_17
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For wide-angle images with heavy lens distortion, especially those widely used in multi-camera systems, the single global homography cannot satisfy the required warp due to nonlinear distortions, leading to misalignment and shape distortion. This paper proposes a multi-homography warping to stitch wide-angle images with unknown lens distortion, which integrates multiple local homographies with a global homography for accurate alignment and shape preservation. We suggest a solution by conditional sampling to obtain a larger proportion of inliers for more accurate estimation of local and global projective transformations. We introduce an adaptive weighting scheme to combine these transformations for smoothing our warp over the entire target image from the local homographies to the global homography. The experiments evaluate the alignment accuracy and shape preservation of the proposed method. We propose a real-time, direct monocular SLAM method for omnidirectional or wide field-of-view fisheye cameras. Both tracking (direct image alignment) and mapping (pixel-wise distance filtering) are directly formulated for the unified omnidirectional model, which can model central imaging devices with a field of view above 180 °. This is in contrast to existing direct mono-SLAM approaches like DTAM or LSD-SLAM, which operate on rectified images, in practice limiting the field of view to around 130 ° diagonally. Not only does this allows to observe - and reconstruct - a larger portion of the surrounding environment, but it also makes the system more robust to degenerate (rotation-only) movement. The two main contribution are (1) the formulation of direct image alignment for the unified omnidirectional model, and (2) a fast yet accurate approach to incremental stereo directly on distorted images. We evaluated our framework on real-world sequences taken with a 185 ° fisheye lens, and compare it to a rectified and a piecewise rectified approach. Radial lens distortion often exists in images taken by common cameras, which violates the assumption of pinhole camera model. Estimating the radial lens distortion of an image is an important preprocessing step for many vision applications. This paper intends to employ CNNs (Convolutional Neural Networks), to achieve radial distortion correction. However, the main issue hinder its progress is the scarcity of training data with radial distortion annotations. Inspired by the growing availability of image dataset with non-radial distortion, we propose a framework to address the issue by synthesizing images with radial distortion for CNNs. We believe that a large number of images of high variation of radial distortion is generated, which can be well exploited by deep CNN with a high learning capacity. We present quantitative results that demonstrate the ability of our technique to estimate the radial distortion with comparisons against several baseline methods, including an automatic method based on Hough transforms of distorted line images. We present a minimal solution for aligning two images taken by a rotating camera from point correspondences. The solution particularly addresses the case where there is lens distortion in the images. We assume to know the two camera centers but not the focal lengths and allow the latter to vary. Our solution uses a minimal number (three) of point correspondences and is well suited to be used in a hypothesis testing framework. It does not suffer from numerical instabilities observed in other algebraic minimal solvers and is also efficient. We validate our solution in multi-image panoramic stitching on real images with lens distortion. We introduce a new rational function (RF) model for radial lens distortion in wide-angle and catadioptric lenses, which allows the simultaneous linear estimation of motion and lens geometry from two uncalibrated views of a 3D scene. In contrast to existing models which admit such linear estimates, the new model is not specialized to any particular lens geometry, but is sufficiently general to model a variety of extreme distortions. The key step is to define the mapping between image (pixel) coordinates and 3D rays in camera coordinates as a linear combination of nonlinear functions of the image coordinates. Like a "kernel trick", this allows a linear algorithm to estimate nonlinear models, and in particular offers a simple solution to the estimation of nonlinear image distortion. The model also yields an explicit form for the epipolar curves, allowing correspondence search to be efficiently guided by the epipolar geometry. We show results of an implementation of the RF model in estimating the geometry of a real camera lens from uncalibrated footage, and compare the estimate to one obtained using a calibration grid. Many computer vision algorithms rely on the assumptions of the pinhole camera model, but lens distortion with off-the-shelf cameras is usually significant enough to violate this assumption. Many methods for radial distortion estimation have been proposed, but they all have limitations. Robust automatic radial distortion estimation from a single natural image would be extremely useful for many applications, particularly those in human-made environments containing abundant lines. For example, it could be used in place of an extensive calibration procedure to get a mobile robot or quadrotor experiment up and running quickly in an indoor environment. We propose a new method for automatic radial distortion estimation based on the plumb-line approach. The method works from a single image and does not require a special calibration pattern. It is based on Fitzgibbon's division model, robust estimation of circular arcs, and robust estimation of distortion parameters. We perform an extensive empirical study of the method on synthetic images. We include a comparative statistical analysis of how different circle fitting methods contribute to accurate distortion parameter estimation. We finally provide qualitative results on a wide variety of challenging real images. The experiments demonstrate the method's ability to accurately identify distortion parameters and remove distortion from images. Images captured by fisheye lenses violate the pinhole camera assumption and suffer from distortions. Rectification of fisheye images is therefore a crucial preprocessing step for many computer vision applications. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end multi-context collaborative deep network for removing distortions from single fisheye images. In contrast to conventional approaches, which focus on extracting hand-crafted features from input images, our method learns high-level semantics and low-level appearance features simultaneously to estimate the distortion parameters. To facilitate training, we construct a synthesized dataset that covers various scenes and distortion parameter settings. Experiments on both synthesized and real-world datasets show that the proposed model significantly outperforms current state of the art methods. Our code and synthesized dataset will be made publicly available. In this paper, we propose a new method to compensate for lens distortion in image stitching. Lens distortions that arise from the nonlinearity of a lens are the main causes for mismatches in stitching images. We estimate the distortion factors for each image using the Division Model and linearize the projected relationships between matching distorted feature points. Because our method works at the RANSAC stage, the estimated distortion factors are further refined during the bundle adjustment phase, and thus accurate distortion factors are obtained. Our experimental results show that the proposed method can efficiently and accurately estimate the distortion factors, and result in a more accurate stitched image than other previous methods based on estimated lens distortion factors. We present a method to automatically correct the radial distortion caused by wide-angle lenses using the distorted lines generated by the projection of 3D straight lines onto the image. Lens distortion is estimated by the division model using one parameter, which allows to state the problem into the Hough transform scheme by adding a distortion parameter to better extract straight lines from the image. This paper describes an algorithm which applies this technique, providing all the details of the design of an improved Hough transform. We perform experiments using calibration patterns and real scenes showing a strong distortion to illustrate the performance of the proposed method. Source Code The source code, the code documentation, and the online demo are accessible at the IPOL web page of this article 1 . In this page, an implementation is available for download. Compilation and usage instructions are included in the README.txt file of the archive. The importance of precise homography estimation is often underestimated even though it plays a crucial role in various vision applications such as plane or planarity detection, scene degeneracy tests, camera motion classification, image stitching, and many more. Ignoring the radial distortion component in homography estimation—even for classical perspective cameras—may lead to significant errors or totally wrong estimates. In this paper, we fill the gap among the homography estimation methods by presenting two algorithms for estimating homography between two cameras with different radial distortions. Both algorithms can handle planar scenes as well as scenes where the relative motion between the cameras is a pure rotation. The first algorithm uses the minimal number of five image point correspondences and solves a nonlinear system of polynomial equations using Grobner basis method. The second algorithm uses a non-minimal number of six image point correspondences and leads to a simple system of two quadratic equations in two unknowns and one system of six linear equations. The proposed algorithms are fast, stable, and can be efficiently used inside a RANSAC loop. This paper proposes a novel parametric warp which is a spatial combination of a projective transformation and a similarity transformation. Given the projective transformation relating two input images, based on an analysis of the projective transformation, our method smoothly extrapolates the projective transformation of the overlapping regions into the non-overlapping regions and the resultant warp gradually changes from projective to similarity across the image. The proposed warp has the strengths of both projective and similarity warps. It provides good alignment accuracy as projective warps while preserving the perspective of individual image as similarity warps. It can also be combined with more advanced local-warp-based alignment methods such as the as-projective-as-possible warp for better alignment accuracy. With the proposed warp, the field of view can be extended by stitching images with less projective distortion (stretched shapes and enlarged sizes). Registration is a prerequisite for fusion of geometrically distorted images. Traditionally, intensity-based image registration methods are preferred to feature-based ones due to higher accuracy of the former than that of the latter. To reduce computational load, image registration is often carried out using the approximate-level coefficients of a wavelet-like transform. Directional selectivity of the transform and the objective function used for the coefficients play vital roles in the alignment process of images. This paper introduces an image registration algorithm that uses the approximate-level coefficients of the curvelet transform, directional selectivity of which is better than many wavelet-like transforms. A conditional entropy-based objective function is developed for registration using a suitable probabilistic model of the curvelet coefficients of images. Suitability of the probability distribution of the coefficients is validated using a standard method to assess goodness of fit. To align the distorted images, the affine transformation that possesses parameters related to the translation, rotation, scaling, and shearing is used. Extensive experimentations are carried out to test the performance of the proposed registration method considering that the images are synthetically or naturally distorted. Experimental results show that performance of the proposed registration method is superior to existing methods in terms of commonly used performance metrics. Fisheye image rectification and estimation of intrinsic parameters for real scenes have been addressed in the literature by using line information on the distorted images. In this paper, we propose an easily implemented fisheye image rectification algorithm with line constrains in the undistorted perspective image plane. A novel Multi-Label Energy Optimization (MLEO) method is adopted to merge short circular arcs sharing the same or the approximately same circular parameters and select long circular arcs for camera rectification. Further we propose an efficient method to estimate intrinsic parameters of the fisheye camera by automatically selecting three properly arranged long circular arcs from previously obtained circular arcs in the calibration procedure. Experimental results on a number of real images and simulated data show that the proposed method can achieve good results and outperforms the existing approaches and the commercial software in most cases. Most algorithms in 3D computer vision rely on the pinhole camera model because of its simplicity, whereas video optics, especially low-cost wide-angle or fish-eye lenses, generate a lot of non-linear distortion which can be critical. To find the distortion parameters of a camera, we use the following fundamental property: a camera follows the pinhole model if and only if the projection of every line in space onto the camera is a line. Consequently, if we find the transformation on the video image so that every line in space is viewed in the transformed image as a line, then we know how to remove the distortion from the image. The algorithm consists of first doing edge extraction on a possibly distorted video sequence, then doing polygonal approximation with a large tolerance on these edges to extract possible lines from the sequence, and then finding the parameters of our distortion model that best transform these edges to segments. Results are presented on real video images, compared with distortion calibration obtained by a full camera calibration method which uses a calibration grid. We propose a novel omnidirectional stereo camera setup that is formed by two ultra-wide field-of-view (FOV) fisheye cameras. The proposed configuration is formed by two 245-degree FOV fisheye cameras, facing opposite directions, that are rigidly mounted on two sides of a rod. The overlapping view in the two fisheye images forms a ring-shaped spatial stereo setup. Our system provides stereo observations with full 360-degree FOV in horizontal directions and 65-degree FOV in the vertical direction. In addition, the two fisheye cameras altogether also provide full spherical monocular coverage of the surrounding environment. We address challenges in camera modeling, fisheye intrinsic calibration, stereo self-calibration, and depth estimation. We develop a lens-specific fisheye camera calibration method that uses manufacturer data for the optical lens to assist with the intrinsic calibration and develop an online self-calibration approach for estimating stereo extrinsic parameters. The overlapping camera views are rectified into stereo image pairs, from which a spatial stereo matching pipeline is developed for depth estimation in all horizontal directions. We show both qualitative and quantitative analysis to validate our approach. Any projection of a 3D scene into a wide-angle image unavoidably results in distortion. Current projection methods either bend straight lines in the scene, or locally distort the shapes of scene objects. We present a method that minimizes this distortion by adapting the projection to content in the scene, such as salient scene regions and lines, in order to preserve their shape. Our optimization technique computes a spatially-varying projection that respects user-specified constraints while minimizing a set of energy terms that measure wide-angle image distortion. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by showing results on a variety of wide-angle photographs, as well as comparisons to standard projections. This paper presents a robust and flexible framework for augmented reality which does not require instrumenting either the environment or the workpiece. A model-based visual tracking system is combined with rate gyroscopes to produce a system which can track the rapid camera rotations generated by a head-mounted camera, even if images are substantially degraded by motion blur. This tracking yields estimates of head position at video field rate (50Hz) which are used to align computer-generated graphics on an optical see-through display. Nonlinear optimisation is used for the calibration of display parameters which include a model of optical distortion. Rendered visuals are pre-distorted to correct the optical distortion of the display. Re-identifying people in a network of cameras requires an invariant human representation. State of the art algorithms are likely to fail in real-world scenarios due to serious perspective changes. Most of existing approaches focus on invariant and discriminative features, while ignoring the body alignment issue. In this paper we propose 3 methods for improving the performance of person re-identification. We focus on eliminating perspective distortions by using 3D scene information. Perspective changes are minimized by affine transformations of cropped images containing the target (1). Further we estimate the human pose for (2) clustering data from a video stream and (3) weighting image features. The pose is estimated using 3D scene information and motion of the target. We validated our approach on a publicly available dataset with a network of 8 cameras. The results demonstrated significant increase in the re-identification performance over the state of the art. A huge fraction of cameras used nowadays is based on CMOS sensors with a rolling shutter that exposes the image line by line. For dynamic scenes cameras this introduces undesired effects like stretch, shear and wobble. It has been shown earlier that rotational shake induced rolling shutter effects in hand-held cell phone capture can be compensated based on an estimate of the camera rotation. In contrast, we analyse the case of significant camera motion, e.g. where a bypassing street level capture vehicle uses a rolling shutter camera in a 3D reconstruction framework. The introduced error is depth dependent and cannot be compensated based on camera motion rotation alone, invalidating also rectification for stereo camera systems. On top, significant lens distortion as often present in wide angle cameras intertwines with rolling shutter effects as it changes the time at which a certain 3D point is seen. We show that naive 3D reconstructions (assuming global shutter) will deliver biased geometry already for very mild assumptions on vehicle speed and resolution. We then develop rolling shutter dense multiview stereo algorithms that solve for time of exposure and depth at the same time, even in the presence of lens distortion and perform an evaluation on ground truth laser scan models as well as on real street-level data. Most optical character recognition (OCR) systems need to be trained and tested on the symbols that are to be recognized. Therefore, ground truth data is needed. This data consists of character images together with their ASCII code. Among the approaches for generating ground truth of real world data, one promising technique is to use electronic version of the scanned documents. Using an alignment method, the character bounding boxes extracted from the electronic document are matched to the scanned image. Current alignment methods are not robust to different similarity transforms. They also need calibration to deal with non-linear local distortions introduced by the printing scanning process. In this paper we present a significant improvement over existing methods, allowing to skip the calibration step and having a more accurate alignment, under all similarity transforms. Our method finds a robust and pixel accurate scanner independent alignment of the scanned image with the electronic document, allowing the extraction of accurate ground truth character information. The accuracy of the alignment is demonstrated using documents from the UW3 dataset. The results show that the mean distance between the estimated and the ground truth character bounding box position is less than one pixel.