Revision as of 14:41, 6 June 2007

Steel gates of entrance to City Campus next to Sheaf Building

Student Projects

We always offer projects to motivated students (first degree, Masters of Science, ERASMUS student, ...). If you are interested in doing a project in computer vision, let us know. Here is a description of ongoing research areas to give you an idea of possible projects. You can also suggest a research topic yourself.

If you work with us, you can learn a lot of skills which are relevant for a career as a software developer:

• Computer Vision, Signal processing, Robotics
• Linear Algebra, Analysis
• Software Engineering

We are using state-of-the-art cross-platform software tools:

• Source-code documentation with doxygen
• Cross-platform user-interfaces with Qt. You can develop full-featured GUI-software which runs under GNU/Linux, Microsoft Windows, and MacOS!
• Platform-independent Standard Template Library
• Platform-independent Boost Library
• Scripting using the dynamically-typed object-oriented programming language Ruby

Project areas

Stitching for microscopes

A bird's feather (reflected light, darkfield) (7.2 MByte video, 10.1 MByte video)

Stitching using the feedback of the microscope's drive

Premise

1. A microscope-video of an object being moved in x-, and y-direction (parallel to the focussed plane)
2. Later a microscope-video of an object being moved in x-, y-, and z-direction (i.e. including depth changes)

To Do

• Generate stitched image from the input-video (linear complexity desirable) without feedback from microscope-drive
• Cross-compare images to avoid a drift of the estimated shift
• Later provide extended depth of field by maximising a focus measure.

See Also

• Depth from Focus

External Links

• CombineZ

Contact Jan Wedekind for a project in this area.

Automated photo stitching

Hilbre Island input images

Resulting panorama image created with Hugin

Premise

• A set of images taken with the same camera-settings (aperture, exposure time, focal length) and center of projection but different viewing directions (mainly yaw, pitch)
• Manually selected correspondences.

To Do

<math> \lambda\,\begin{pmatrix}m^\prime_{1}\\m^\prime_{2}\\f\end{pmatrix}= \begin{pmatrix}h_{11}&h_{12}&h_{13}\\h_{21}&h_{22}&h_{23}\\h_{31}&h_{32}&h_{33}\end{pmatrix}\, \begin{pmatrix}m_{1}\\m_{2}\\f\end{pmatrix} </math>

• Improve the correspondences using 2D cross-correlation (roll-angle will assumed to be low).
• (Re)implement the panotools-solver preferably in Ruby. Use given correspondences to optimize camera-parameters: rotations, common focal length.
• Adopt existing method for removing fringes (transitions/blending)

Optional:

• Automatically find correspondences
• Optimize more camera-parameters (distortion,...)

Also see panorama viewer.

Contact Jan Wedekind for a project in this area.

External Links

• Photo stitching software PTGUI
• Rodriguez Matrix
• Panorama Tools software suite (mirror of Helmut Dersch's former web-page)
• Hugin
• Depth of focus for panorama tools
• Autostitch (commercial)

RANSAC

Recognition and tracking with three or four degrees-of-freedom. More ...

Random sample consensus is a method for object recognition. This project is about recognising macroscopic rigid objects (e.g. household and office articles like cups, stapler, ...

To Do

• Select point-features and a suitable similarity measure
• Implement RANSAC algorithm and apply to at least 3 degrees-of-freedom problem.
• Demonstrate algorithm on real object.

Optional

• Extend RANSAC implementation to more degrees-of-freedom problem (maybe use line- and point-features)

HDR imaging

Stanage Edge

Processed image after composing HDR and tonemapping

Merging pre-aligned 8-bit colour photos into a High dynamic range image will be of high importance as long as low-cost HDR-cameras are not available for the consumer market.

Premise

• A pre-aligned exposure-series of pictures

To Do

• Detect over- and undersaturated colour-components
• Estimate camera sensivity
• Merge images into a single HDR image

Optional:

• Map to reasonably realistic-looking low-range image

See Also

• Wikipedia page on HDR
• HDR images at flickr.com
• OpenEXR library
• HDR workflow with Qtpfsgui to create HDR images and tonemapping
• HDR workflow with hugin to create HDR panoramas

See Also

• British Life and Culture Module
• Microscope Vision Software
• Mimas Camera Calibration

See Also

• Mimas
• Hornetseye

External Links

• Google code search