Semantic segmentation using deep neural networks has been widely explored to generate high-level contextual information for autonomous vehicles. To acquire a complete $180^\circ$ semantic understanding of the forward surroundings, we propose to stitch semantic images from multiple cameras with varying orientations. However, previously trained semantic segmentation models showed unacceptable performance after significant changes to the camera orientations and the lighting conditions. To avoid time-consuming hand labeling, we explore and evaluate the use of data augmentation techniques, specifically skew and gamma correction, from a practical real-world standpoint to extend the existing model and provide more robust performance. The presented experimental results have shown significant improvements with varying illumination and camera perspective changes.
Tianjin University（天津大学）；State Administration of Cultural Heritage（国家文物局）
Active camera relocalization (ACR) is a new problem in computer vision that significantly reduces the false alarm caused by image distortions due to camera pose misalignment in fine-grained change detection (FGCD). Despite the fruitful achievements that ACR can support, it still remains a challenging problem caused by the unstable results of relative pose estimation, especially for outdoor scenes, where the lighting condition is out of control, i.e., the twice observations may have highly varied illuminations. This paper studies an illumination-invariant active camera relocalization method, it…
Object detection and semantic segmentation are two of the most widely adopted deep learning algorithms in agricultural applications. One of the major sources of variability in image quality acquired in the outdoors for such tasks is changing lighting condition that can alter the appearance of the objects or the contents of the entire image. While transfer learning and data augmentation to some extent reduce the need for large amount of data to train deep neural networks, the large variety of cultivars and the lack of shared datasets in agriculture makes wide-scale field deployments difficult. …
The limited dynamic range of commercial compact camera sensors results in an inaccurate representation of scenes with varying illumination conditions, adversely affecting image quality and subsequently limiting the performance of underlying image processing algorithms. Current state-of-the-art (SoTA) convolutional neural networks (CNN) are developed as post-processing techniques to independently recover under-/over-exposed images. However, when applied to images containing real-world degradations such as glare, high-beam, color bleeding with varying noise intensity, these algorithms amplify th…
AdaFuse-Det: Adaptive Cross-Modal Fusion of Event Cameras for Robust Object Detection in Low-Light RGB Imagery
SRM University AP, India（印度SRM大学AP分校）；Aptiv, Bengaluru, India（印度Aptiv公司，班加罗尔）；Arizona State University, USA（美国亚利桑那州立大学）；Sejong University, South Korea（韩国世宗大学）；Indian Institute of Information Technology Sri City, India（印度Sri City信息学院）
Today's state-of-the-art methods for 3D object detection are based on lidar, stereo, or monocular cameras. Lidar-based methods achieve the best accuracy, but have a large footprint, high cost, and mechanically-limited angular sampling rates, resulting in low spatial resolution at long ranges. Recent approaches based on low-cost monocular or stereo cameras promise to overcome these limitations but struggle in low-light or low-contrast regions as they rely on passive CMOS sensors. In this work, we propose a novel 3D object detection modality that exploits temporal illumination cues from a low-co…
Camera parameters not only play an important role in determining the visual quality of perceived images, but also affect the performance of vision algorithms, for a vision-guided robot. By quantitatively evaluating four object detection algorithms, with respect to varying ambient illumination, shutter speed and voltage gain, it is observed that the performance of the algorithms is highly dependent on these variables. From this observation, a novel active control of camera parameters method is proposed, to make robot vision more robust under different light conditions. Experimental results demo…
Recent automotive vision work has focused almost exclusively on processing forward-facing cameras. However, future autonomous vehicles will not be viable without a more comprehensive surround sensing, akin to a human driver, as can be provided by 360° panoramic cameras. We present an approach to adapt contemporary deep network architectures developed on conventional rectilinear imagery to work on equirectangular 360° panoramic imagery. To address the lack of annotated panoramic automotive datasets availability, we adapt a contemporary automotive dataset, via style and projection transformation…
Monitoring and Adapting the Physical State of a Camera for Autonomous Vehicles
German Aerospace Center (DLR)（德国航空航天中心）；TU Berlin（柏林工业大学）；Einstein Center Digital Future（爱因斯坦数字未来中心）；Science of Intelligence Excellence Cluster（科学智能卓越集群）
One of fundamental issues for security robots is to detect and track people in the surroundings. The main problems of this task are real-time constraints, a changing background, varying illumination conditions and a non-rigid shape of the person to be tracked. In this paper, we propose a solution for tracking with a pan-tilt camera and a passive infrared range (PIR) sensor to detect the moving object based on consecutive frame difference. The proposed method is excellent in real-time performance because it requires only a little memory and computation. Experiment results show that this method …
Osaka University（大阪大学）；Nara Institute of Science and Technology（奈良先端科学技术大学院大学）
Accurate camera localization is an essential part of tracking systems. However, localization results are greatly affected by illumination. Including data collected under various lighting conditions can improve the robustness of the localization algorithm to lighting variation. However, this is very tedious and time consuming. By using synthesized images it is possible to easily accumulate a large variety of views under varying illumination and weather conditions. Despite continuously improving processing power and rendering algorithms, synthesized images do not perfectly match real images of t…
While modern deep neural networks (DNNs) achieve state-of-the-art results for illuminant estimation, it is currently necessary to train a separate DNN for each type of camera sensor. This means when a camera manufacturer uses a new sensor, it is necessary to retrain an existing DNN model with training images captured by the new sensor. This paper addresses this problem by introducing a novel sensor-independent illuminant estimation framework. Our method learns a sensor-independent working space that can be used to canonicalize the RGB values of any arbitrary camera sensor. Our learned space re…
Time-of-Flight (ToF) cameras require active illumination to obtain depth information thus the power of illumination directly affects the performance of ToF cameras. Traditional ToF imaging algorithms is very sensitive to illumination and the depth accuracy degenerates rapidly with the power of it. Therefore, the design of a power efficient ToF camera always creates a painful dilemma for the illumination and the performance trade-off. In this paper, we show that despite the weak signals in many areas under extreme short exposure setting, these signals as a whole can be well utilized through a l…
Improved Mapping Between Illuminations and Sensors for RAW Images
AI Center-Toronto, Samsung Electronics（三星电子AI中心-多伦多）；Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, York University（约克大学电气工程与计算机科学系）；Google Research（谷歌研究）
Event-Based Method for High-Speed 3D Deformation Measurement under Extreme Illumination Conditions
College of Aerospace Science and Engineering, National University of Defense Technology（国防科技大学航空航天科学与工程学院）；Hunan Provincial Key Laboratory of Image Measurement and Vision Navigation（湖南省图像测量与视觉导航重点实验室）
Mask-based lensless cameras can be flat, thin, and light-weight, which makes them suitable for novel designs of computational imaging systems with large surface areas and arbitrary shapes. Despite recent progress in lensless cameras, the quality of images recovered from the lensless cameras is often poor due to the ill-conditioning of the underlying measurement system. In this paper, we propose to use coded illumination to improve the quality of images reconstructed with lensless cameras. In our imaging model, the scene/object is illuminated by multiple coded illumination patterns as the lensl…
Tampere University of Technology（坦佩雷理工大学）；Intel Finland（英特尔芬兰公司）；Czech Technical University in Prague（布拉格捷克理工大学）
We present a statistical color constancy method that relies on novel gray pixel detection and mean shift clustering. The method, called Mean Shifted Grey Pixel -- MSGP, is based on the observation: true-gray pixels are aligned towards one single direction. Our solution is compact, easy to compute and requires no training. Experiments on two real-world benchmarks show that the proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods in the camera-agnostic scenario. In the setting where the camera is known, MSGP outperforms all statistical methods.
Target tracking in a camera network is an important task for surveillance and scene understanding. The task is challenging due to disjoint views and illumination variation in different cameras. In this direction, many graph-based methods were proposed using appearance-based features. However, the appearance information fades with high illumination variation in the different camera FOVs. We, in this paper, use spatial and temporal information as the state of the target to learn a policy that predicts the next camera given the current state. The policy is trained using Q-learning and it does not…
Microsoft AIT - Advanced Imaging Technologies（微软高级成像技术部）；CMU（卡内基梅隆大学）；Microsoft Research - Cambridge（微软剑桥研究院）
We propose a computational model for shape, illumination and albedo inference in a pulsed time-of-flight (TOF) camera. In contrast to TOF cameras based on phase modulation, our camera enables general exposure profiles. This results in added flexibility and requires novel computational approaches. To address this challenge we propose a generative probabilistic model that accurately relates latent imaging conditions to observed camera responses. While principled, realtime inference in the model turns out to be infeasible, and we propose to employ efficient non-parametric regression trees to appr…
Active stereo cameras that recover depth from structured light captures have become a cornerstone sensor modality for 3D scene reconstruction and understanding tasks across application domains. Existing active stereo cameras project a pseudo-random dot pattern on object surfaces to extract disparity independently of object texture. Such hand-crafted patterns are designed in isolation from the scene statistics, ambient illumination conditions, and the reconstruction method. In this work, we propose the first method to jointly learn structured illumination and reconstruction, parameterized by a …
Adapting CNNs for Fisheye Cameras without Retraining
Australian Centre For Robotics (ACFR)（澳大利亚机器人中心）；School of Aerospace, Mechanical and Mechatronic Engineering（航空航天、机械与机电工程学院）；The University of Sydney（悉尼大学）
University of Southern California（南加州大学）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；Anhui Normal University（安徽师范大学）；The University of Tokyo（东京大学）
To reconstruct spectral signals from multi-channel observations, in particular trichromatic RGBs, has recently emerged as a promising alternative to traditional scanning-based spectral imager. It has been proven that the reconstruction accuracy relies heavily on the spectral response of the RGB camera in use. To improve accuracy, data-driven algorithms have been proposed to retrieve the best response curves of existing RGB cameras, or even to design brand new three-channel response curves. Instead, this paper explores the filter-array based color imaging mechanism of existing RGB cameras, and …
University of Genova（热那亚大学）；Eindhoven University of Technology（埃因霍温理工大学）；University of California Santa Cruz（加州大学圣克鲁兹分校）
Wearable cameras stand out as one of the most promising devices for the upcoming years, and as a consequence, the demand of computer algorithms to automatically understand the videos recorded with them is increasing quickly. An automatic understanding of these videos is not an easy task, and its mobile nature implies important challenges to be faced, such as the changing light conditions and the unrestricted locations recorded. This paper proposes an unsupervised strategy based on global features and manifold learning to endow wearable cameras with contextual information regarding the light co…
Image retrieval under varying illumination conditions, such as day and night images, is addressed by image preprocessing, both hand-crafted and learned. Prior to extracting image descriptors by a convolutional neural network, images are photometrically normalised in order to reduce the descriptor sensitivity to illumination changes. We propose a learnable normalisation based on the U-Net architecture, which is trained on a combination of single-camera multi-exposure images and a newly constructed collection of similar views of landmarks during day and night. We experimentally show that both ha…
Instituto de Investigación en Ingeniería de Aragón (I3A)（阿拉贡工程研究院（I3A））；Universidad de Zaragoza（萨拉戈萨大学）
Monocular SLAM in deformable scenes will open the way to multiple medical applications like computer-assisted navigation in endoscopy, automatic drug delivery or autonomous robotic surgery. In this paper we propose a novel method to simultaneously track the camera pose and the 3D scene deformation, without any assumption about environment topology or shape. The method uses an illumination-invariant photometric method to track image features and estimates camera motion and deformation combining reprojection error with spatial and temporal regularization of deformations. Our results in simulated…
South China University of Technology（华南理工大学）；Tampere University（坦佩雷大学）；Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院）
Regressing the illumination of a scene from the representations of object appearances is popularly adopted in computational color constancy. However, it's still challenging due to intrinsic appearance and label ambiguities caused by unknown illuminants, diverse reflection property of materials and extrinsic imaging factors (such as different camera sensors). In this paper, we introduce a novel algorithm by Cascading Convolutional Color Constancy (in short, C4) to improve robustness of regression learning and achieve stable generalization capability across datasets (different cameras and scenes…
Institute for Information Transmission Problems, RAS（俄罗斯科学院信息传输问题研究所）；National Research University The Higher School of Economics（国立研究型大学高等经济学院）；Gideon Brothers（吉迪恩兄弟公司）；Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, University of Zagreb（萨格勒布大学电气工程与计算学院）；Nanjing University（南京大学）；Image Processing Systems Institute of RAS（俄罗斯科学院图像处理系统研究所）；Huawei MultiMedia Team（华为多媒体团队）；University of Milano – Bicocca（米兰比可卡大学）
Illumination estimation is the essential step of computational color constancy, one of the core parts of various image processing pipelines of modern digital cameras. Having an accurate and reliable illumination estimation is important for reducing the illumination influence on the image colors. To motivate the generation of new ideas and the development of new algorithms in this field, the 2nd Illumination estimation challenge~(IEC\#2) was conducted. The main advantage of testing a method on a challenge over testing in on some of the known datasets is the fact that the ground-truth illuminati…
AmbientEye: A Dataset for Pupil Segmentation under Natural Ambient Infrared Illumination
Electrical Engineering, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology（电子工程系，韩国科学技术院）；Intelligent Systems Department, Delft University of Technology（智能系统系，代尔夫特理工大学）
We present a CNN-based technique to estimate high-dynamic range outdoor illumination from a single low dynamic range image. To train the CNN, we leverage a large dataset of outdoor panoramas. We fit a low-dimensional physically-based outdoor illumination model to the skies in these panoramas giving us a compact set of parameters (including sun position, atmospheric conditions, and camera parameters). We extract limited field-of-view images from the panoramas, and train a CNN with this large set of input image--output lighting parameter pairs. Given a test image, this network can be used to inf…
Google Inc.（谷歌公司）；USC Institute for Creative Technologies（南加州大学创新技术研究院）
We present a learning-based method to infer plausible high dynamic range (HDR), omnidirectional illumination given an unconstrained, low dynamic range (LDR) image from a mobile phone camera with a limited field of view (FOV). For training data, we collect videos of various reflective spheres placed within the camera's FOV, leaving most of the background unoccluded, leveraging that materials with diverse reflectance functions reveal different lighting cues in a single exposure. We train a deep neural network to regress from the LDR background image to HDR lighting by matching the LDR ground tru…
Most digital camera pipelines use color constancy methods to reduce the influence of illumination and camera sensor on the colors of scene objects. The highest accuracy of color correction is obtained with learning-based color constancy methods, but they require a significant amount of calibrated training images with known ground-truth illumination. Such calibration is time consuming, preferably done for each sensor individually, and therefore a major bottleneck in acquiring high color constancy accuracy. Statistics-based methods do not require calibrated training images, but they are less acc…
Computer vision tasks often have side information available that is helpful to solve the task. For example, for crowd counting, the camera perspective (e.g., camera angle and height) gives a clue about the appearance and scale of people in the scene. While side information has been shown to be useful for counting systems using traditional hand-crafted features, it has not been fully utilized in counting systems based on deep learning. In order to incorporate the available side information, we propose an adaptive convolutional neural network (ACNN), where the convolutional filter weights adapt …
Deep intra-operative illumination calibration of hyperspectral cameras
Siemens AG（西门子股份公司）；German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ)（德国癌症研究中心）；Helmholtz Information and Data Science School for Health（亥姆霍兹健康信息与数据科学学院）；Heidelberg University（海德堡大学）；National Center for Tumor Diseases (NCT)（国家肿瘤疾病中心）；Heidelberg University Hospital（海德堡大学医院）；University Medical Center Mannheim（曼海姆大学医学中心）；DKFZ Hector Cancer Institute at the University Medical Center Mannheim（德国癌症研究中心赫克曼海姆大学医学中心癌症研究所）
Rolling Shutter (RS) cameras have become popularized because of low-cost imaging capability. However, the RS cameras suffer from undesirable artifacts when the camera or the subject is moving, or illumination condition changes. For that reason, Monocular Visual Odometry (MVO) with RS cameras produces inaccurate ego-motion estimates. Previous works solve this RS distortion problem with motion prediction from images and/or inertial sensors. However, the MVO still has trouble in handling the RS distortion when the camera motion changes abruptly (e.g. vibration of mobile cameras causes extremely f…
University of Tübingen（图宾根大学）；Google Research（谷歌研究院）
Inverse rendering of an object under entirely unknown capture conditions is a fundamental challenge in computer vision and graphics. Neural approaches such as NeRF have achieved photorealistic results on novel view synthesis, but they require known camera poses. Solving this problem with unknown camera poses is highly challenging as it requires joint optimization over shape, radiance, and pose. This problem is exacerbated when the input images are captured in the wild with varying backgrounds and illuminations. Standard pose estimation techniques fail in such image collections in the wild due …
