Abstract

In navigation that involves several moving agents or robots that are not in possession of each other's plans, a scheme for resolution of collision conflicts between them becomes mandatory. A resolution scheme is proposed in this paper specifically for the case where it is not feasible to have a priori the plans and locations of all other robots, robots can broadcast information between one another only within a specified communication distance, and a robot is restricted in its ability to react to collision conflicts that occur outside of a specified time interval called the reaction time interval. Collision conflicts are resolved through velocity control by a search operation in the robot's velocity space. The existence of a cooperative phase in conflict resolution is indicated by a failure of the search operation to find velocities in the individual velocity space of the respective robots involved in the conflict. A scheme for cooperative resolution of conflicts is modeled as a search in the joint velocity space of the robots involved in conflict when the search in the individual space yields a failure. The scheme for cooperative resolution may further involve modifying the states of robots not involved in any conflict. This phenomenon is characterized as the propagation phase where cooperation spreads to robots not directly involved in the conflict. Apart from presenting the methodology for the resolution of conflicts at various levels (individual, cooperative, and propagation), the paper also formally establishes the existence of the cooperative phase during real‐time navigation of multiple mobile robots. The effect of varying robot parameters on the cooperative phase is presented and the increase in requirement for cooperation with the scaling up of the number of robots in a system is also illustrated. Simulation results involving several mobile robots are presented to indicate the efficacy of the proposed strategy. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Abstract

We present a methodology for optimal target detection in a multi sensor surveillance system. The system consists of mobile sensors that guard a rectangular surveillance zone crisscrossed by moving targets. Targets penetrate the surveillance zone with poisson rates at uniform velocities. Under these conditions we present a motion strategy computation for each sensor such that it maximizes target detection for the next T time-steps. A coordination mechanism among sensors ensures that overlapping and overlooked regions of observation among sensors are minimized. This coordination mechanism is interleaved with the motion strategy computation to reduce detections of the same target by more than one sensor for the same time-step. To avoid an exhaustive search in the joint space of all the sensors the coordination mechanism constrains the search by assigning priorities to the sensors and thereby arbitrating among sensory tasks. A comparison of this methodology with other multi target tracking schemes verifies its efficacy in maximizing detections. "Sample" and "time-step" are used equivalently and interchangeably in this paper.

Abstract

The size and detail of graphics environments in everyday use has gone up considerably recently. Still, most applications use locally resident geometric content for rendering. In this paper, we present a system to stream large graphics environments from a central server to multiple number of clients. The streaming is transparent to the user who can treat remote models just like local ones. The streaming system automatically adapts to the rendering capabilities, network bandwidth and latency of the client and transmits an optimized model. We present the design of the streaming system and give results of streaming a large model using it

Abstract

Large virtual environments arise in many applications and may be used by many users simultaneously for walkthroughs. It is not feasible to store a copy of the whole environment at each of the client locations due to their size. The dynamic nature of the environment also makes it more convenient for a central server to ensure consistency across different users. In this paper, we present a client-server based system for visualizing large environments from remote users. The client gets only the portion of the geometry necessary for navigating around the current user location. The system can adapt to different client parameters such as graphics capability, network bandwidth, communication latency, etc. We present the design and implementation of the system in this paper and produce relevant results using it

Abstract

Graphics models for virtual environments are increasingly getting massive, requiring large amounts of memory to store and high end graphics capabilities to render. It may not be possible or desirable to store the entire model in the station where it will be rendered, especially for environments that change. Such virtual models could be stored on a server and streamed to remote clients on demand. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of a client-server system to render large virtual environments. Our system can provide the best visualization quality for a wide range in connection bandwidth and latency and the rendering capacity of the client. The system uses a visibility-based geometry representation so that little invisible geometry is sent to the client. Incremental updating and client-side prediction of user motion optimize the communication requiremnts for a given client. We present results of the study conducted on a representative range of the relevant parameters in this paper

Abstract

Image Based Rendering holds a lot of promise for navigating through a real world scene without modeling it manually. Different representations have been proposed for IBR in the literature. In this paper, we argue that a representation using depth maps and texture images from a number of viewpoints is a rich and viable representation for IBR. We discuss different aspects of this representation including capture, representation, compression and rendering. We show several results to show how the representation can be used to model and render complex scenes.

Abstract

Searching in scanned documents is an important problem in Digital Libraries. If OCRs are not available, the scanned images are inaccessible. In this paper, we demonstrate a searching procedure without an intermediate textual representation. We achieve effective retrieval from document databases by matching at word-level using image features. Word profiles, structural features and transform domain representations are employed for characterising the word images. A novel partial matching approach based on dynamic time warping (DTW) is proposed to take care of word form variations. With the new partial matching procedure, morphologically variant words become similar in image space. This is specially useful for grouping together similar words for indexing purpose. We extend our formulation for cross-lingual search with the help of transliteration.

Abstract

This paper presents a novel approach for retrieval of relevant documents from a large collection of printed document images, where search in corresponding textual content is practically impossible due to the unavailability of robust OCRs. We achieve effective search by matching at wordlevel using image features. Importance of a document for a given query is also computed at image-level.

Abstract

Recognition of planar shapes is an important problem in computer vision andpattern recognition. The same planar object contour imaged from di1erent cameras or from di1erent viewpoints looks di1erent and their recognition is non-trivial. Traditional shape recognition deals with views of the shapes that di1er only by simple rotations, translations, and scaling. However, shapes su1er more serious deformation between two general views and hence recognition approaches designed to handle translations, rotations, and/or scaling would prove to be insu5cient. Many algebraic relations between matching primitives in multiple views have been identi7edrecently. In this paper, we explore how shape properties andmultiview relations can be combinedto recognize planar shapes across multiple views. We propose novel recognition constraints that a planar shape boundary must satisfy in multiple views. The constraints are on the rank of a Fourier-domain measurement matrix computed from the points on the shape boundary. Our method can additionally compute the correspondence between the curve points after a match is established. We demonstrate the applications of these constraints experimentally on a number of synthetic and real images.

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.