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 41 frames per second for an image size of 640x480, 128 disparity levels, and using 4 path directions for the SGM method.

Abstract: In this paper we improve the histogram of oriented gradients (HOG), a core descriptor of state-of-the-art object detection, by the use of higher-level information coming from image segmentation. The idea is to re-weight the descriptor while computing it without increasing its size. The benefits of the proposal are two-fold: (i) to improve the performance of the detector by enriching the descriptor information and (ii) take advantage of the information of image segmentation, which in fact is likely to be used in other stages of the detection system such as candidate generation or refinement.
We test our technique in the INRIA person dataset, which was originally developed to test HOG, embedding it in a human detection system. The well-known segmentation method, mean-shift (from smaller to larger super-pixels), and different methods to re-weight the original descriptor (constant, region-luminance, color or texture-dependent) has been evaluated. We achieve performance improvements of 4:47% in detection rate through the use of differences of color between contour pixel neighborhoods as re-weighting function.

Abstract: An autonomous mobile robot must face the correspondence or data association problem in order to carry out tasks like place recognition or unknown environment mapping. In order to put into correspondence two maps, most methods estimate the transformation relating the maps from matches established between low level feature extracted from sensor data. However, finding explicit matches between features is a challenging and computationally expensive task. In this paper, we propose a new method to align obstacle maps without searching explicit matches between features. The maps are obtained from a stereo pair. Then, we use a vocabulary tree approach to identify putative corresponding maps followed by the Newton minimization algorithm to find the transformation that relates both maps. The proposed method is evaluated in a typical office environment showing good performance.

Abstract: This paper presents details of a general purpose micro-task on-demand platform based on the crowdsourcing philosophy. This platform was specifically developed for mobile devices in order to exploit the strengths of such devices; namely: i) massivity, ii) ubiquity and iii) embedded sensors. The combined use of mobile platforms and the crowdsourcing model allows to tackle from the simplest to the most complex tasks. Users experience is the highlighted feature of this platform (this fact is extended to both task-proposer and tasksolver). Proper tools according with a specific task are provided to a task-solver in order to perform his/her job in a simpler, faster and appealing way. Moreover, a task can be easily submitted by just selecting predefined templates, which cover a wide range of possible applications. Examples of its usage in computer vision and computer games are provided illustrating the potentiality of the platform.