A novel active-vision system for 3-D object recognition was developed. The vision system combines object pre-marking and active sensing. Therein, an object is modeled by a few of its 2-D perspective (standard) views, each with a corresponding viewing axis defined by a marker placed on the object. The operation of the active-vision system is characterized by its off-line planning and on-line rec...

Abstract The Endangered giant pangolin Smutsia gigantea is rare and elusive across its Central African range. Because of solitary nocturnal nature, the species difficult to study so ecology little known. Pangolins are considered most trafficked mammals in world. Therefore, confirming presence accurately monitoring trends distribution abundance essential inform prioritize conservation efforts. C...

This paper presents a new sensor placement measure called resolvability. This measure provides a technique for estimating the relative ability of various sensor systems, including single camera systems, stereo pairs, multi-baseline stereo systems, and 3D rangefinders, to accurately control visually manipulated objects. The measure also indicates the capability of a visual sensor to provide spat...

Interaction using depth-sensing cameras has many applications in computer vision and spatial manipulation tasks. We present a user study that compares a short-range depth-sensing camera-based controller with an inversekinematics keyboard controller and a forward-kinematics joystick controller for two placement tasks. The study investigated ease of use, user performance and user preferences. Tas...

We describe a learning-based approach to handeye coordination for robotic grasping from monocular images. To learn hand-eye coordination for grasping, we trained a large convolutional neural network to predict the probability that task-space motion of the gripper will result in successful grasps, using only monocular camera images and independently of camera calibration or the current robot pos...

Optimal port placement is a delicate issue in minimally invasive endoscopic surgery, particularly in robotically assisted surgery. A good choice of the instruments' and endoscope's ports can avoid time-consuming consecutive new port placement. We present a novel method to intuitively and precisely plan the port placement. The patient is registered to its pre-operative CT by just moving the endo...

Optimal port placement is a delicate issue in minimally invasive endoscopic surgery, particularly in robotically assisted surgery. A good choice of the instruments’ and endoscope’s ports can avoid timeconsuming consecutive new port placement. We present a novel method to intuitively and precisely plan the port placement. The patient is registered to its pre-operative CT by just moving the endos...

This paper focuses on the estimation of the intrinsic camera parameters and the trajectory of the camera from an image sequence. Intrinsic camera calibration and pose estimation are the prerequisites for many applications involving navigation tasks, scene reconstruction, and merging of virtual and real environments. Proposed and evaluated is a technical solution to decrease the sensitivity of s...

Image processing has been applied to traffic analysis in recent years, with different goals. In this report, a new approach is presented for extracting vehicular speed information, given a sequence of real-time traffic images. We extract moving edges and process the resulting edge information to obtain quantitative geometric measurements of vehicles. This differs from existing approaches becaus...