Laws@SRI.COM (Ken Laws) (08/05/87)
John Nagle asked about image processing systems for tracking scene features. Such systems do exist, but are often tied to specific applications. A system for tracking missiles or stars against a simple background will be quite different from one for tracking vehicles in a street scene. Robotic applications can be anywhere in between, depending on the robot's environment and function. SRI currently has a robot vehicle that can navigate hallways by detecting the door frames and other simple linear features. We also have more elaborate systems for doing edge matching or correlation matching in stereo pairs. I'm working combined segmentation/classification/tracking. Others here are doing matching in range imagery, including model-based matching of the type useful in industrial inspection and bin picking. Similar work has been done at Stanford, where Tom Binford would be a good contact, and at CMU and most vision labs. The work of Hans-Hellmut Nagel and of Moravec come to mind for the tracking of low-level features, but there are many relevant papers in any conference on computer vision or robotics. -- Ken -------