A mobile mapping system (MMS) is the answer of the geoinformation community to the exponentially growing demand for various geospatial data with increasingly higher accuracies and captured by multiple sensors. As the mobile mapping technology is pushed to explore its use for various applications on water, rail, or road, the need emerges to have an external sensor calibration procedure which is portable, fast and easy to perform. This way, sensors can be mounted and demounted depending on the application requirements without the need for time consuming calibration procedures. A new methodology is presented to provide a high quality external calibration of cameras which is automatic, robust and fool proof.The MMS uses an Applanix POSLV420, which is a tightly coupled GPS/INS positioning system. The cameras used are Point Grey color video cameras synchronized with the GPS/INS system. The method uses a portable, standard ranging pole which needs to be positioned on a known ground control point. For calibration a well studied absolute orientation problem needs to be solved. Here, a mutual information based image registration technique is studied for automatic alignment of the ranging pole. Finally, a few benchmarking tests are done under various lighting conditions which proves the methodology’s robustness, by showing high absolute stereo measurement accuracies of a few centimeters.
Traditional watershed and marker-based image segmentation algorithms are very sensitive to noise. The main reason for this is that these
segmentation algorithms are locally dependent on some type of edge indicator input image that is traditionally computed on a pixel-by-pixel basis. Additionally, as a result of raw watershed segmentation, the original image can be seriously oversegmented, and it may be difficult to reduce the oversegmentation and the impact of noise without also inducing several undesired region merges. This last problem is a typical result of local "edge gaps" that may appear along the topographic watershed mountain rims. Through these gaps the marker or watershed labels can easily leak into neighboring segments. We propose a novel pair of algorithms that uses "thick fluid" label propagation in order to try and solve these problems. The thick fluid technique is based on considering information from multiple adjacent pixels along the topographic watershed mountain rims that separate the different objects in an initial pre-segmented image.
The aim of this paper is to present a methodology to generate a partition of an image and a hierarchical region merging scheme to improve the meaningfulness of the segmentation, by reducing excessive object fragmentation. The segmentation method is based on the watershed transform applied to the image gradient magnitude. Prior to the actual segmentation, the image is smoothed to decrease the amount of detail detected by the watershed transform. To further improve the segmentation result, we use an iterative region merging process that uses a graph to represent the image partitions. In this process the most similar pair of adjacent regions is sequentially merged according to a predefined similarity metric. We investigate the use of a combined region merging criterion that takes into account both the intensity similarity and the contrast at the boundary of two adjacent regions. Results obtained illustrate the good combined performance of this segmentation and merging methods and the usefulness of the combined similarity function.
In this paper we discuss a new implementation of a floating point based rainfalling watershed algorithm. First, we analyze and compare our proposed algorithm and its implementation with two implementations based on the well-known discrete Vincent- Soille flooding watershed algorithms. Next, we show that by carefully designing and optimizing our algorithm a memory (bandwidth) efficient and high speed implementation can be realized. We report on timing and memory usage results for different compiler settings, computer systems and algorithmic parameters. Our optimized implementation turns out to be significantly faster than the two Vincent-Soille based implementations with which we compare. Finally, we include some segmentation results to illustrate that visually acceptable and almost identical segmentation results can always be obtained for all algorithms being compared. And, we also explain how, in combination with other pre- or post- processing techniques, the problem of oversegmentation (a typical problem of all raw watershed algorithms) can be (partially) overcome. All these properties make that our proposed implementation is an excellent candidate for use in various practical applications where high speed performance and/or efficient memory usage is needed.
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