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The main focus of this work is the development of new methods for the self-calibration of a rigid stereo camera system. However, many of the algorithms introduced here have a wider impact, particularly in robot hand-eye calibration with all its different areas of application. Stereo self-calibration refers to the computation of the intrinsic and extrinsic parameters of a stereo rig using neither a priori knowledge on the movement of the rig nor on the geometry of the observed scene.
The stereo parameters obtained by self-calibration, namely rotation and translation from left to right camera, are used for computing depth maps for both images, which are applied for rendering correctly occluded virtual objects into a real scene (Augmented Reality).
The proposed methods were evaluated on real and synthetic data and compared to algorithms from the literature. In addition to a stereo rig, an optical tracking system with a camera mounted on an endoscope was calibrated without a calibration pattern using the proposed extended hand-eye calibration algorithm.
The self-calibration methods developed in this work have a number of features, which make them easily applicable in practice: They rely on temporal feature tracking only, as this monocular tracking in a continuous image sequence is much easier than left-to-right tracking when the camera parameters are still unknown.
Intrinsic and extrinsic camera parameters are computed during the self-calibration process, i.e., no calibration pattern is required. The proposed stereo self-calibration approach can also be used for extended hand-eye calibration, where the eye poses are obtained by structure-from-motion rather than from a calibration pattern.
An inherent problem to hand-eye calibration is that it requires at least two general movements of the cameras in order to compute the rigid transformation.
If the motion is not general enough, only a part of the parameters can be obtained, which would not be sufficient for computing depth maps. Therefore, a main part of this work discusses methods for data selection that increase the robustness of hand-eye calibration. Different new approaches are shown, the most successful ones being based on vector quantization.
The data selection algorithms developed in this work can not only be used for stereo self-calibration, but also for classic robot hand-eye calibration, and they are independent of the actually used hand-eye calibration algorithm.
We present a novel split and merge based method for dividing a given metric map into distinct regions, thus effectively creating a topological map on top of a metric one. The initial metric map is obtained from range data that are converted to a geometric map consisting of linear approximations of the indoor environment.
The splitting is done using an objective function that computes the quality of a region, based on criteria such as the average region width (to distinguish big rooms from corridors) and overall direction (which accounts for sharp bends).
A regularization term is used in order to avoid the formation of very small regions, which may originate from missing or unreliable sensor data. Experiments based on data acquired by a mobile robot equipped with sonar sensors are presented, which demonstrate the capabilities of the proposed method.
The tracheoesophageal (TE) substitute voice is currently state–of–the–art treatment to restore the ability to speak after laryngectomy. The intelligibility while talking over a telephone is an important clinical factor, as it is a crucial part of the patients’ social life. An objective way to rate the intelligibility of substitute voices when talking over a telephone is desirable to improve the post–laryngectomy speech therapy. An automatic speech recognition (ASR) system was applied to 41 high quality recordings of post–laryngectomy patients. The ASR system was trained with normal, non–pathologic speech. It yielded a word accuracy (WA) of 36.9%±18.0%; compared to the intelligibility rating of a group of human experts the ASR system had a correlation coefficient of -.88. After downsampling the 41 recordings to telephone quality, the ASR system reached a WA of 26.4%±13.9% leading to a correlation coefficient of -.80. These results confirm that an ASR system can be used for objective intelligibility rating over the telephone.
This paper presents a novel algorithm for computing absolute space representations (ASRs) in Yeap, W.K. and Jefferies, M. (1988) for mobile robots equipped with sonar sensors and an odometer. The robot is allowed to wander freely (i.e. without following any fixed path) along the corridors in an office environment from a given start point to an end point. It then wanders from the end point back to the start point. The resulting ASRs computed in both directions are shown
This paper shows the experiences made with a multimedia based case study in academic education. The case study has been used within three courses of business process engineering. It was compared to a case study based solely on text. 13 assumptions have been evaluated. The main conclusion is that the multimedia based case study is much more practice oriented than a text based case study. Also the solutions of the students, which did the multimedia based case study, have been of higher quality. But on the other hand the expectations of the students to a multimedia based system are hard to meet. Based on these experiences some hints in further developing of multimedia based case studies are formulated.
This paper shows how a mobile robot equipped with sonar sensors and an odometer is used to test ideas about cognitive mapping. The robot first explores an office environment and computes a "cognitive map" which is a network of ASRs [1]. The robot generates two networks, one for the outward journey and the other for the journey home.
It is shown that both networks are different. The two networks, however, are not merged to form a single network. Instead, the robot attempts to use distance information implicit in the shape of each ASR to find its way home. At random positions in the homeward journey, the robot calculates its orientation towards home. The robot's performances for both problems are evaluated and found to be surprisingly accurate.