Abstract: This thesis evaluates the performance of different state-of-art feature detectors and descriptors algorithms in the Visible-LWIR cross-spectral scenario. The focus is to determine if current detector and descriptor algorithms can be used to match features between the LWIR spectrum and the visible spectrum in applications such as, visual odometry, object recognition, image registration and stereo vision. An outdoor cross-spectral dataset was created to evaluate the suitability of the different algorithms. The results
show that the tested algorithms are not suitable to the task of matching features across different spectra. The repeatability ratio was smaller than the 30 percent in the best case and in general matched features were not accurate located. Additionally, these results also suggest that is necessary to create new algorithms that take into account the nature of the different spectra, describing characteristics that exist in both spectra such as discontinuities.

Abstract: Intrinsic image decomposition is a challenging problem that consists in separating an image into its physical characteristics: reflectance and shading. This problem can be solved in different ways, but most methods have combined information from several visual cues. In this work we describe an extension of an existing method proposed by Serra et al. which considers two color descriptors and combines them by means of a Markov Random Field. We analyze in depth the weak points of the method and we explore more possibilities to use in both descriptors. The proposed extension depends on the combination of the cues considered to overcome some of the limitations of the original method. Our approach is tested on the MIT dataset and Beigpour et al. dataset, which contain images of real objects acquired under controlled conditions and synthetic images respectively, with their corresponding ground truth.

Abstract: Dense, robust and real-time computation of depth information from stereo-camera systems is a computationally demanding requirement for robotics, advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and autonomous vehicles. Semi-Global Matching (SGM) is a widely used algorithm that propagates consistency constraints along several paths across the image. This work presents a real-time system producing reliable disparity estimation results on the new embedded energy efficient GPU devices. Our design runs on a Tegra X1 at 42 frames per second (fps) for an image size of 640x480, 128 disparity levels, and using 4 path directions for the SGM method.