Smart camera

About: Smart camera is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 5571 publications have been published within this topic receiving 93054 citations. The topic is also known as: intelligent camera.

High-frequency MAV state estimation using low-cost inertial and optical flow measurement units

Abstract: This paper develops a simple and low-cost method for 3D, high-rate vehicle state estimation, specially designed for free-flying Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs). We fuse observations from inertial measurement units and the recently appeared low-cost optical flow smart cameras. These smart cameras integrate a sonar altimeter, a triaxial gyrometer and an optical flow sensor, and directly provide metric ego-motion information in the form of body velocities and altitude. Compared to state-of-the-art visual-inertial odometry methods, we are able to drastically reduce the computational load in the main processor unit, and obtain an accurate estimation of the vehicle state at a high update rate of 100Hz. We thus extend the current use of these smart cameras from hovering purposes to odometry estimation. In order to propose a simple algorithmic solution, we investigate the performances of two Kalman filters, in the extended and error-state flavors, alongside a large number of algorithm variations, using simulations and real experiments with precise ground-truth. We observe that the marginal performance gain attained with these algorithm improvements does not pay for the effort of implementing them. We conclude that a classical EKF in its simplest form is sufficient for providing motion estimates that coherently exploit the available measurements.

Offloading processing of images from a portable digital camera

Abstract: Images are offloaded from a portable camera automatically to a network server at the time the images are taken, transparently to a user of the camera. The server executes processing functions on the images and returns the output of the processing over the network to the camera and/or other user-defined destination device to thereby relieve the camera processor of potentially complex processing chores.

Replaceable hardware component of a camera control unit for video systems

Abstract: A video imaging system is provided including a camera head for transmitting image data to a CCU, a CCU for receiving and processing the image data into a usable format, a storage device accessible by the camera control unit, information stored on the storage device, and wherein the information is used by the camera control unit for selecting hardware in the camera control unit to process the image data.

Real Time Cameras: A Guide for Game Designers and Developers

Abstract: The control of cameras is as important in games as it is in cinema. How the camera tracks and moves determines our point of view and influences our attitude towards the content. A poorly designed camera system in a game can disrupt a users experience, while a well-designed one can make a good game into a great one. The challenge in games is that the camera must respond to unscripted events, and this is where much of the difficulty of designing real-time camera systems arises. The increasing use of motion in virtual environments, marked by the inclusion of physics modeling and complex collision detection systems, means that camera systems must be even more effective to keep up. Real-Time Cameras is written by an experienced game developer who has written camera control systems for award-winning games such as Metroid Prime. Mark Haigh-Hutchinson discusses the key algorithms for camera control and then shows how to implement them in code. This book is written for game developers and designers, although it is also pertinent to other professionals in the interactive media field. Real-Time Cameras presents a practical approach to camera systems, introducing their theory, design, and implementation. * The first book on this critical and often poorly understood aspect of game development * Includes analysis of camera and control systems from existing games along with practical implementation advice * Discusses the key algorithms with pseudo code examples, and includes movies demonstrating camera technique on the companion CD-ROM

Distributed computing in IoT: System-on-a-chip for smart cameras as an example

Abstract: There are four major components in application systems with internet-of-things (IoT): sensors, communications, computation and service, where large amount of data are acquired for ultra-big data analysis to discover the context information and knowledge behind signals. To support such large-scale data size and computation tasks, it is not feasible to employ centralized solutions on cloud servers. Thanks for the advances of silicon technology, the cost of computation become lower, and it is possible to distribute computation on every node in IoT. In this paper, we take video sensing network as an example to show the idea of distributed computing in IoT. Existing related works are reviewed and the architecture of a system-on-a-chip solution for distributed smart cameras is proposed with coarse-grained reconfigurable image stream processing architecture. It can accelerate various computer vision algorithms for distributed smart cameras in IoT.