A Multilayer Perceptron-Based Spherical Visual Compass Using Global Features.

This paper presents a visual compass method utilizing global features, specifically spherical moments. One of the primary challenges faced by photometric methods employing global features is the variation in the image caused by the appearance and disappearance of regions within the camera's field of view as it moves. Additionally, modeling the impact of translational motion on the values of global features poses a significant challenge, as it is dependent on scene depths, particularly for non-planar scenes. To address these issues, this paper combines the utilization of image masks to mitigate abrupt changes in global feature values and the application of neural networks to tackle the modeling challenge posed by translational motion. By employing masks at various locations within the image, multiple estimations of rotation corresponding to the motion of each selected region can be obtained. Our contribution lies in offering a rapid method for implementing numerous masks on the image with real-time inference speed, rendering it suitable for embedded robot applications. Extensive experiments have been conducted on both real-world and synthetic datasets generated using Blender. The results obtained validate the accuracy, robustness, and real-time performance of the proposed method compared to a state-of-the-art method.

Rotation Estimation: A Closed-Form Solution Using Spherical Moments.

Photometric moments are global descriptors of an image that can be used to recover motion information. This paper uses spherical photometric moments for a closed form estimation of 3D rotations from images. Since the used descriptors are global and not of the geometrical kind, they allow to avoid image processing as features extraction, matching, and tracking. The proposed scheme based on spherical projection can be used for the different vision sensors obeying the central unified model: conventional, fisheye, and catadioptric. Experimental results using both synthetic data and real images in different scenarios are provided to show the efficiency of the proposed method.

Adaptive median binary patterns for fully automatic nerves tracking in ultrasound images.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE: In the last decade, Ultrasound-Guided Regional Anesthesia (UGRA) gained importance in surgical procedures and pain management, due to its ability to perform target delivery of local anesthetics under direct sonographic visualization. However, practicing UGRA can be challenging, since it requires high skilled and experienced operator. Among the difficult task that the operator can face, is the tracking of the nerve structure in ultrasound images. Tracking task in US images is very challenging due to the noise and other artifacts. METHODS: In this paper, we introduce a new and robust tracking technique by using Adaptive Median Binary Pattern(AMBP) as texture feature for tracking algorithms (particle filter, mean-shift and Kanade-Lucas-Tomasi(KLT)). Moreover, we propose to incorporate Kalman filter as prediction and correction steps for the tracking algorithms, in order to enhance the accuracy, computational cost and handle target disappearance. RESULTS: The proposed method have been applied on real data and evaluated in different situations. The obtained results show that tracking with AMBP features outperforms other descriptors and achieved best performance with 95% accuracy. CONCLUSIONS: This paper presents the first fully automatic nerve tracking method in Ultrasound images. AMBP features outperforms other descriptors in all situations such as noisy and filtered images.

Efficient iterative pose estimation using an invariant to rotations.

This paper deals with pose estimation using an iterative scheme. We show that using adequate visual information, pose estimation can be performed iteratively with only three independent unknowns, which are the translation parameters. Specifically, an invariant to rotational motion is used to estimate the camera position. In addition, an adequate transformation is applied to the proposed invariant to decrease the nonlinearities between the variations in image space and 3-D space. Once the camera position is estimated, we show that the rotation can be estimated efficiently using two different direct methods. The proposed approach is compared against two other methods from the literature. The results show that using our method, pose tracking in image sequences and the convergence rate for randomly generated poses are improved.