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Image merging in a dynamic visual communication system with multiple cameras

University of British Columbia

In tele-operation, visual communication plays an important role as a source of information for control of a remote machine. The main objective of this thesis is to investigate the image merging in a dynamic visual communication system (DVCS) that can provide better visual presentation of the remote machine's working environment to the operator. The conventional VCS such as television cannot provide wide field of view (WFOV) and high resolution at the same time without significantly increasing the number of pixels and the bandwidth which is difficult and expensive. One of the proposed alternatives is to have a high resolution insert at the area of interest (AOI), determined by the observer's current eye orientation, projected into a cutout in the low resolution wide field of view (WFOV) background. This system is called a dynamic VCS (DVCS) in this thesis because of its active feedback control over the viewing scene. A DVCS requires a multi-channel imaging system, dual-resolution presentation, an eye tracker controlling the location of the AOI insert within pixel level accuracy, and an image merging system that can register and fuse AOI and WFOV images, all in real time. This thesis discuss some of these issues, mainly focusing on the design and implementation of the image merging in such a system. Several possible approaches are analyzed with regard to the free parameters in the implementation, and experiments are carried out on seven sets of AOI and WFOV images. These images are taken by off-the-shelf cameras with different rotational angles, zooms (scale), and optical centres (translational change) (RST). The optical axis for AOI and WFOV imaging are kept parallel. Based on the analysis and experiments, a new multi-process approach was designed and implemented which can trade off performance characteristics for various imaging conditions. This approach requires only rough estimation of the RST values to start with and presents a registered and fused dual resolution image to the viewer. This processing is also calibration free and can relax the specification requirements of the position sensor and camera control devices. A new study of using comer attributes to recover RST values leads to a derivation of an analytical representation of the significance value for detecting scale-consistent corners. There are many other issues to be studied in the future for a better DVC system.

Thesis/Dissertation

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2009-05-29

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http://hdl.handle.net/2429/8473

Electrical and Computer Engineering

University of British Columbia

UBCV

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