The need to relate measurements made by a camera to a different known coordinate system arises in many engineering applications. Historically, it appeared for the first time in the connection with cameras mounted on robotic systems. This problem is commonly known as hand-eye calibration. In this paper, we present several formulations of hand-eye calibration that lead to multivariate polynomial optimization problems. We show that the method of convex linear matrix inequality (LMI) relaxations can be used to effectively solve these problems and to obtain globally optimal solutions. Further, we show that the same approach can be used for the simultaneous hand-eye and robot-world calibration. Finally, we validate the proposed solutions using both synthetic and real datasets.
Continual Hand-Eye Calibration for Open-world Robotic Manipulation
School of Automation Science and Engineering, South China University of Technology（华南理工大学自动化科学与工程学院）；State Key Laboratory of Robotics, the Institutes for Robotics and Intelligent Manufacturing, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院机器人研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
University of Georgia（佐治亚大学）；Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）；MPI Informatik（马克斯·普朗克信息学研究所）
From scientific research to commercial applications, eye tracking is an important tool across many domains. Despite its range of applications, eye tracking has yet to become a pervasive technology. We believe that we can put the power of eye tracking in everyone's palm by building eye tracking software that works on commodity hardware such as mobile phones and tablets, without the need for additional sensors or devices. We tackle this problem by introducing GazeCapture, the first large-scale dataset for eye tracking, containing data from over 1450 people consisting of almost 2.5M frames. Using…
China University of Mining and Technology（中国矿业大学）；Australian National University（澳大利亚国立大学）
Vision based text entry systems aim to help disabled people achieve text communication using eye movement. Most previous methods have employed an existing eye tracker to predict gaze direction and design an input method based upon that. However, these methods can result in eye tracking quality becoming easily affected by various factors and lengthy amounts of time for calibration. Our paper presents a novel efficient gaze based text input method, which has the advantage of low cost and robustness. Users can type in words by looking at an on-screen keyboard and blinking. Rather than estimate ga…
Fish-eye cameras are becoming increasingly popular in computer vision, but their use for 3D measurement is limited partly due to the lack of an accurate, efficient and user-friendly calibration procedure. For such a purpose, we propose a method to calibrate the intrinsic and extrinsic parameters (including radial distortion parameters) of two/multiple fish-eye cameras simultaneously by using a wand under general motions. Thanks to the generic camera model used, the proposed calibration method is also suitable for two/multiple conventional cameras and mixed cameras (e.g. two conventional camera…
We propose a least-squares formulation to the noisy hand-eye calibration problem using dual-quaternions, and introduce efficient algorithms to find the exact optimal solution, based on analytic properties of the problem, avoiding non-linear optimization. We further present simple analytic approximate solutions which provide remarkably good estimations compared to the exact solution. In addition, we show how to generalize our solution to account for a given extrinsic prior in the cost function. To the best of our knowledge our algorithm is the most efficient approach to optimally solve the hand…
ShanghaiTech University（上海科技大学）；Shanghai Engineering Research Center of Intelligent Vision and Imaging（上海智能视觉与成像工程技术研究中心）
Multi-perspective cameras are quickly gaining importance in many applications such as smart vehicles and virtual or augmented reality. However, a large system size or absence of overlap in neighbouring fields-of-view often complicate their calibration. We present a novel solution which relies on the availability of an external motion capture system. Our core contribution consists of an extension to the hand-eye calibration problem which jointly solves multi-eye-to-base problems in closed form. We furthermore demonstrate its equivalence to the multi-eye-in-hand problem. The practical validity o…
The recent development of calibration algorithms has been driven into two major directions: (1) an increasing accuracy of mathematical approaches and (2) an increasing flexibility in usage by reducing the dependency on calibration objects. These two trends, however, seem to be contradictory since the overall accuracy is directly related to the accuracy of the pose estimation of the calibration object and therefore demanding large objects, while an increased flexibility leads to smaller objects or noisier estimation methods. The method presented in this paper aims to resolves this problem in tw…
Gaze estimation has grown rapidly in accuracy in recent years. However, these models often fail to take advantage of different computer vision (CV) algorithms and techniques (such as small ResNet and Inception networks and ensemble models) that have been shown to improve results for other CV problems. Additionally, most current gaze estimation models require the use of either both eyes or an entire face, whereas real-world data may not always have both eyes in high resolution. Thus, we propose a gaze estimation model that implements the ResNet and Inception model architectures and makes predic…
In this work, we present an approach for monocular hand-eye calibration from per-sensor ego-motion based on dual quaternions. Due to non-metrically scaled translations of monocular odometry, a scaling factor has to be estimated in addition to the rotation and translation calibration. For this, we derive a quadratically constrained quadratic program that allows a combined estimation of all extrinsic calibration parameters. Using dual quaternions leads to low run-times due to their compact representation. Our problem formulation further allows to estimate multiple scalings simultaneously for dif…
Technische Universität München（慕尼黑工业大学）；Carl Zeiss Meditec（卡尔蔡司医疗技术公司）；Sun Yat-Sen University（中山大学）；Klinikum rechts der Isar der Technische Universität München（慕尼黑工业大学 Rechts der Isar 医院）
Ophthalmic microsurgery is known to be a challenging operation, which requires very precise and dexterous manipulation. Image guided robot-assisted surgery (RAS) is a promising solution that brings significant improvements in outcomes and reduces the physical limitations of human surgeons. However, this technology must be further developed before it can be routinely used in clinics. One of the problems is the lack of proper calibration between the robotic manipulator and appropriate imaging device. In this work, we developed a flexible framework for hand-eye calibration of an ophthalmic robot …
United States Department of Agriculture Agricultural Research Service（美国农业部农业研究局）；The Hashemite University（哈希姆大学）
Robot-world, hand-eye calibration is the problem of determining the transformation between the robot end-effector and a camera, as well as the transformation between the robot base and the world coordinate system. This relationship has been modeled as $\mathbf{AX}=\mathbf{ZB}$, where $\mathbf{X}$ and $\mathbf{Z}$ are unknown homogeneous transformation matrices. The successful execution of many robot manipulation tasks depends on determining these matrices accurately, and we are particularly interested in the use of calibration for use in vision tasks. In this work, we describe a collection of …
UC San Diego（加州大学圣地亚哥分校）；Microsoft Research（微软研究院）
We present a novel, automatic eye gaze tracking scheme inspired by smooth pursuit eye motion while playing mobile games or watching virtual reality contents. Our algorithm continuously calibrates an eye tracking system for a head mounted display. This eliminates the need for an explicit calibration step and automatically compensates for small movements of the headset with respect to the head. The algorithm finds correspondences between corneal motion and screen space motion, and uses these to generate Gaussian Process Regression models. A combination of those models provides a continuous mappi…
Eye-in-hand camera calibration is a fundamental and long-studied problem in robotics. We present a study on using learning-based methods for solving this problem online from a single RGB image, whilst training our models with entirely synthetic data. We study three main approaches: one direct regression model that directly predicts the extrinsic matrix from an image, one sparse correspondence model that regresses 2D keypoints and then uses PnP, and one dense correspondence model that uses regressed depth and segmentation maps to enable ICP pose estimation. In our experiments, we benchmark thes…
From a Bird's Eye View to See: Joint Camera and Subject Registration without the Camera Calibration
College of Intelligence and Computing, Tianjin University（天津大学智能与计算学部）；Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院深圳先进技术研究院）；City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学）；University of South Carolina（南卡罗来纳大学）
Kalib: Easy Hand-Eye Calibration with Reference Point Tracking
School of Electronic Information and Electrical Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（电子信息与电气工程学院，上海交通大学）；Meta Robotics Institute, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（元机器人研究所，上海交通大学）；Qing Yuan Research Institute（青元研究院）；MoE Key Lab of Artificial Intelligence, AI Institute, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（人工智能联合重点实验室，人工智能学院，上海交通大学）
The University of Tokyo（东京大学）；CyberAgent, Inc.（CyberAgent 公司）；Ritsumeikan University（立命馆大学）；Osaka University（大阪大学）
For a humanoid robot to make eye contact and initiate communication with a person, it is necessary to estimate the person's head position. However, eye contact becomes difficult due to the mechanical delay of the robot when the person is moving. Owing to these issues, it is important to conduct a head-position prediction to mitigate the effect of the delay in the robot motion. Based on the fact that humans turn their heads before changing direction while walking, we hypothesized that the accuracy of three-dimensional (3D) head-position prediction from a first-person view can be improved by con…
We describe a learning-based approach to hand-eye 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 pose. This requires the network to observe the spatial relationship between the gripper and objects in the scene, thus learning hand-eye coordination. We then use this network to servo the gripper in real …
Universitat Jaume I（海梅一世大学）；Institute of New Imaging Technologies（新型成像技术研究所）
Non-verbal communication plays a particularly important role in a wide range of scenarios in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). Accordingly, this work addresses the problem of human gesture recognition. In particular, we focus on head and eye gestures, and adopt an egocentric (first-person) perspective using eyewear cameras. We argue that this egocentric view may offer a number of conceptual and technical benefits over scene- or robot-centric perspectives. A motion-based recognition approach is proposed, which operates at two temporal granularities. Locally, frame-to-frame homographies are estimat…
Idiap Research Institute（Idiap研究所）；Eyeware Tech SA（Eyeware科技公司）
Non-invasive gaze estimation methods usually regress gaze directions directly from a single face or eye image. However, due to important variabilities in eye shapes and inner eye structures amongst individuals, universal models obtain limited accuracies and their output usually exhibit high variance as well as biases which are subject dependent. Therefore, increasing accuracy is usually done through calibration, allowing gaze predictions for a subject to be mapped to his/her actual gaze. In this paper, we introduce a novel image differential method for gaze estimation. We propose to directly t…
Vicarious Perception Technologies [VicarVision]（Vicarious Perception Technologies（VicarVision））；Delft University of Technology [TU Delft]（代尔夫特理工大学（TU Delft））
Efficiency and ease of use are essential for practical applications of camera based eye/gaze-tracking. Gaze tracking involves estimating where a person is looking on a screen based on face images from a computer-facing camera. In this paper we investigate two complementary forms of efficiency in gaze tracking: 1. The computational efficiency of the system which is dominated by the inference speed of a CNN predicting gaze-vectors; 2. The usability efficiency which is determined by the tediousness of the mandatory calibration of the gaze-vector to a computer screen. To do so, we evaluate the com…
SurgCalib: Gaussian Splatting-Based Hand-Eye Calibration for Robot-Assisted Minimally Invasive Surgery
Robotics and Control Laboratory, University of British Columbia（机器人与控制实验室，不列颠哥伦比亚大学）；Department of Biomedical Engineering, National University of Singapore（生物医学工程系，新加坡国立大学）；Division of Otolaryngology – Head and Neck Surgery, University of British Columbia（耳鼻喉科–头颈外科部，不列颠哥伦比亚大学）
Technische Universität München（慕尼黑工业大学）；Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）；Johns Hopkins Hospital（约翰斯·霍普金斯医院）；Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）
Retinal surgery is a complex medical procedure that requires exceptional expertise and dexterity. For this purpose, several robotic platforms are currently being developed to enable or improve the outcome of microsurgical tasks. Since the control of such robots is often designed for navigation inside the eye in proximity to the retina, successful trocar docking and inserting the instrument into the eye represents an additional cognitive effort, and is, therefore, one of the open challenges in robotic retinal surgery. For this purpose, we present a platform for autonomous trocar docking that co…
The University of Tokyo（东京大学）；Tokyo Institute of Technology（东京工业大学）
We propose a spatial calibration method for wide Field-of-View (FoV) Near-Eye Displays (NEDs) with complex image distortions. Image distortions in NEDs can destroy the reality of the virtual object and cause sickness. To achieve distortion-free images in NEDs, it is necessary to establish a pixel-by-pixel correspondence between the viewpoint and the displayed image. Designing compact and wide-FoV NEDs requires complex optical designs. In such designs, the displayed images are subject to gaze-contingent, non-linear geometric distortions, which explicit geometric models can be difficult to repre…
Precision robotic manipulation tasks (insertion, screwing, precisely pick, precisely place) are required in many scenarios. Previous methods achieved good performance on such manipulation tasks. However, such methods typically require tedious calibration or expensive sensors. 3D/RGB-D cameras and torque/force sensors add to the cost of the robotic application and may not always be economical. In this work, we aim to solve these but using only weak-calibrated and low-cost webcams. We propose Binocular Alignment Learning (BAL), which could automatically learn the eye-hand coordination and points…
Both, robot and hand-eye calibration haven been object to research for decades. While current approaches manage to precisely and robustly identify the parameters of a robot's kinematic model, they still rely on external devices, such as calibration objects, markers and/or external sensors. Instead of trying to fit the recorded measurements to a model of a known object, this paper treats robot calibration as an offline SLAM problem, where scanning poses are linked to a fixed point in space by a moving kinematic chain. As such, the presented framework allows robot calibration using nothing but a…
VERM: Leveraging Foundation Models to Create a Virtual Eye for Efficient 3D Robotic Manipulation
New Laboratory of Pattern Recognition (NLPR), State Key Laboratory of Multimodal Artificial Intelligence Systems (MAIS), Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所模式识别新技术实验室，多模态人工智能系统国家重点实验室）；School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学人工智能学院）；FiveAges；Shandong University（山东大学）
Institute of Industrial Science, The University of Tokyo（东京大学工业科学研究所）；Microsoft（微软）
Robot navigation technology is required to accomplish difficult tasks in various environments. In navigation, it is necessary to know the information of the external environments and the state of the robot under the environment. On the other hand, various studies have been done on SLAM technology, which is also used for navigation, but also applied to devices for Mixed Reality and the like. In this paper, we propose a robot-device calibration method for navigation with a device using SLAM technology on a robot. The calibration is performed by using the position and orientation information give…
Autonomy is the frontier of research in robotic surgery and its aim is to improve the quality of surgical procedures in the next future. One fundamental requirement for autonomy is advanced perception capability through vision sensors. In this paper, we propose a novel calibration technique for a surgical scenario with da Vinci robot. Calibration of the camera and the robot is necessary for precise positioning of the tools in order to emulate the high performance surgeons. Our calibration technique is tailored for RGB-D camera. Different tests performed on relevant use cases for surgery prove …
Look, Zoom, Understand: The Robotic Eyeball for Embodied Perception
School of Artificial Intelligence, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学人工智能学院）；Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；Dalian University of Technology（大连理工大学）
