Abstract

Configurations of dynamic points viewed by one or more cameras have not been studied much. In this paper, we present several view and time-independent constraints on different configurations of points moving on a plane. We show that 4 points with constant independent velocities or accelerations under affine projection can be characterized in a view independent manner using 2 views. Under perspective projection, 5 coplanar points under uniform linear velocity observed for 3 time instants in a single view have a view-independent characterization. The best known constraint for this case involves 6 points observed for 35 frames. Under uniform acceleration, 5 points in 5 time instants have a view-independent characterization. We also present constraints on a point undergoing arbitrary planar motion under affine projections in the Fourier domain. The constraints introduced in this paper involve fewer points or views than similar results reported in the literature and are simpler to compute in most cases. The constraints developed can be applied to many aspects of computer vision. Recognition constraints for several planar point configurations of moving points can result from them. We also show how time-alignment of views captured independently can follow from the constraints on moving point configurations.

Abstract

We address a few problems in navigation of automated vehicles using images captured by a mounted camera. Specifically, we look at the recognition of sign boards, rectification of planar objects imaged by the camera, and estimation of the position of a vehicle with respect to a fixed sign board. Our solutions are based on contour correspondence between a reference view and the current view. A mapping between corresponding points of a planar object in two different views is a
matrix called the homography. A novel two-step linear algorithm for homography calculation from contour correspondence is developed first. Our algorithm requires the identification of an image contour as the projections of a known planar world contour and the selection of a known starting point. The homography between the reference view and the target view is applied to several reallife navigation applications, results of which are presented in this paper

Abstract

This paper presents several results on images of various configurations of conics. We extract information about the plane from single and multiple views of known and unknown conics, based on planar homography and conic correspondences. We show that a single conic section cannot provide sufficient information. Metric rectification of the plane can be performed from a single view if two conics can be identified to be images of circles without knowing their centers or radii. The homography between two views of a planar scene can be computed if two arbitrary conics are identified in them without knowing anything specific about them. The scene can be reconstructed from a single view if images of a pair of circles can be identified in two planes. Our results are simpler and require less information from the images than previously known results. The results presented here involve univariate polynomial equations of degree 4 or 8 and always have solutions. Applications to metric rectification, homography calculation, 3D reconstruction, and projective OCR are presented to demonstrate the usefulness of our scheme

Abstract

Recognition of discrete planar contours under similarity transformations has received a lot of attention but little work has been reported on recognizing them under more general transformations. Planar object boundaries undergo projective or affine transformations across multiple views. We present two methods to recognize discrete curves in this paper. The first method computes a piecewise parametric approximation of the discrete curve that is projectively invariant. A polygon approximation scheme and a piecewise conic approximation scheme are presented here. The second method computes an invariant sequence directly from the sequence of discrete points on the curve in a Fourier transform space. The sequence is shown to be identical up to a scale factor in all affine related views of the curve. We present the theory and demonstrate its applications to several problems including numeral recognition, aircraft recognition, and homography computation. q 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

Abstract

Computing the transformation between two views of a planar scene is an important step in many computer vision applications. Spatial approaches to solve this problem need corresponding sets of primitives – points, lines, conics, etc. Identification of corresponding primitives in two images is non-trivial, limiting the applicability of such approaches. In this paper, we present a novel Fourier domain based approach that makes use of image intensities for computing the image-to-image transformation. Our approach transforms the images to the Fourier domain and then represents them in a coordinate system in which the affine transformation is reduced to an anisotropic scaling. The anisotropic scale factors can be computed using cross correlation methods, and working backwards from this, we compute the entire transformation. It does not require any correspondences thereby making it practically very useful. Applications to registration and recognition are discussed.

Abstract

Development of OCRs for Indian script is an active area of activity today. Indian scripts present great challenges to an OCR designer due to the large number of letters in the alphabet, the sophisticated ways in which they combine, and the complicated graphemes they result in. The problem is compounded by the unstructured manner in which popular fonts are designed. There is a lot of common structure in the different Indian scripts. In this paper, we argue that a number of automatic and semi-automatic tools can ease the development of recognizers for new font styles and new scripts. We discuss briefly three such tools we developed and show how they have helped build new OCRs. An integrated approach to the design of OCRs for all Indian scripts has great benefits. We are building OCRs for all Indian languages following this approach as part of a system to provide tools to create content in them.

Abstract

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Abstract

Multiview analysis of scenes includes the study of sceneindependent constraints satisfied by a configuration of cameras for all types of scenes as well as the study of viewindependent constraints satisfied by any camera on a configuration of points. In this paper, we derive new constraints involving configurations of points that move with constant velocity, with constant acceleration, and for unconstrained planar motion. We show how these constraints can be applied to problems like motion recognition, frame alignment, etc.

Abstract

Polygon approximation is an important step in the recognition of planar shapes. Traditional polygonal approximation algorithms handle only images that are related by a similarity transformation. The transformation of a planar shape as the viewpoint changes with a perspective camera is a general projective one. In this paper, we present a novel method for polygonal approximation of closed curves that is invariant to projective transformation. The polygons generated by our algorithm from two images, related by a projective homography, are isomorphic. We also describe an application of this in the form of numeral recognition. We demonstrate the importance of this algorithm for real-life applications like number plate recognition, aircraft recognition and metric rectification.

Abstract

Correspondence between pixels is an important problem in stereo vision. Several algorithms have been proposed to carry out this task in literature. Almost all of them employ only gray-values. We show here that addition of primary or secondary evidence maps can improve the correspondence computation. However any particular combination is not guaranteed to provide proper results in a general sitiuation. What one needs is a mechanism to select the evidences which are apropriate for a particular pair of images. We present an algorithm for stereo correspondence that can take advantage of different image features adaptively for matching. A match measure combining different individual measures computed from different featuresis used by our algorithm. The advantages of each feature can be combined in a single correspondence computation. We describe an unsupervised scheme to compute the relevance of each feature to a particular situation, given a set of possibly useful features. We present an implementation of the scheme using dynamic programming for pixel-to-pixel correspondence