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Systems for automated image analysis are useful for a variety of tasks and their importance is still growing due to technological advances and an increase of social acceptance. Especially in the field of driver assistance systems the progress in science has reached a level of high performance. Fully or partly autonomously guided vehicles, particularly for road-based traffic, pose high demands on the development of reliable algorithms due to the conditions imposed by natural environments. At the Institut für Neuroinformatik methods for analyzing driving relevant scenes by computer vision are developed in cooperation with several partners from the automobile industry. We introduce a system which extracts the important information from an image taken by a CCD camera installed at the rear view mirror in a car. The approach consists of a sequential and a parallel sensor and information processing. Three main tasks namely the initial segmentation (object detection), the object tracking and the object classification are realized by integration in the sequential branch and by fusion in the parallel branch. The main gain of this approach is given by the integrative coupling of different algorithms providing partly redundant information.
Coming out of the labs, the first robots are currently appearing on the consumer market. Initially they target rather simple application scenarios ranging from entertainment to home convenience. However, one can expect, that they will capture more complex areas soon. These robots will have a higher and higher level and a broad range of functional competence, and will collaborate and interactively communicate with their human users. All this requires considerable cognitive abilities on the robot’s side and appropriate man-machine interaction technologies. Apart from further development of individual functions and technologies it is crucial to build and evaluate fully integrated systems. This paper describes our approach to construct a robotic assistance system. We present experience with an integrated technology demonstration and the exposure of the integrated system to the public.
CoRA is a robotic assistant whose task is to collaborate with a human operator on simple manipulation or handling tasks. Its sensory channels comprising vision, audition, haptics, and force sensing are used to extract perceptual information about speech, gestures and gaze of the operator, and object recognition. The anthropomorphic robot arm makes goal-directed movements to pick up and hand-over objects. The human operator may mechanically interact with the arm by pushing it away (haptics) or by taking an object out of the robot’s gripper (force sensing). The design objective has been to exploit the human operator’s intuition by modeling the mechanical structure, the senses, and the behaviors of the assistant on human anatomy, human perception, and human motor behavior.
This article describes the current state of our research on anthropomorphic robots. Our aim is to make the reader familiar with the two basic principles our work is based on: anthropomorphism and dynamics. The principle of anthropomorphism means a restriction to human-like robots which use version, audition and touch as their only sensors so that natural man-machine interaction is possible. The principle of dynamics stands for the mathematical framework based on which our robots generate their behavior. Both principles have their root in the idea that concepts of biological behavior and information processing can be exploited to control technical systems.
As service robotics research advances rapidly, availability of objective, reproducible test specifications and evaluation criteria and also of benchmarking is more and more felt to be desirable in the community. As a first step towards benchmarking, in this paper we propose a formalization of tests - exemplified for domestic grasp&place tasks. The underlying philosophy of our approach is to confront the robot system in a black-box manner with requirements of a “rational customer”, and characterize the performance of the system in an objective way by the outcomes of a test-suite tailored to this scenario. A formalized single test description consists of a clear and reproducible specification of the robot’s task and the full context on the one hand, and a number of figures which objectively characterize the test result on the other hand. We illustrate this methodology for the domestic assistance scenario.
NewsGrid
(2005)
Film archives—particularly those storing video material on all kinds of news items—are important information sources for TV stations. Each TV station creates and maintains its own archive by storing video material received via satellite and/or internet on tapes in analogue and/or digital form. It cannot be predicted in advance which of this archived material will actually be used. Thus all material received must be catalogued and stored. On average only a small percentage of the material stored is actually used. Due to the increase in data volumes the cost of maintaining such repositories and retrieving particular stored items has become prohibitive. To-day digital videos are increasingly replacing analogue material. Digital videos offer the advantage that the can be stored in distributed databases and then be transferred without loss of quality to the transmitting station. Such digital archives can be made accessible to many TV stations, thus spreading the maintenance cost. Individual stations can retrieve only the material they actually need for particular news casts. In this paper a grid architecture for distributed video archives for news broadcasts is proposed. A crucial aspect of such a grid approach is that advanced methods for retrieving data must be available.
Sensing and processing of multimedia information is one of the basic traits of human beings. The development of digital technologies and applications allows the production of huge amounts of multimedia data. The rapidly decreasing prices for hardware such as digital cameras/camcorders, sound cards and the corresponding displays led to wide distribution of multimedia-capable input and output devices in all fields of the everyday life, from home entertainment to companies and educational organisations. Thus, multimedia information in terms of digital pictures, videos, and music can be created intuitively and is affordable for a broad spectrum of users.
We present a study on 3D based hand pose recognition using a new generation of low-cost time-of-flight(ToF) sensors intended for outdoor use in automotive human-machine interaction. As signal quality is impaired compared to Kinect-type sensors, we study several ways to improve performance when a large number of gesture classes is involved. We investigate the performance of different 3D descriptors, as well as the fusion of two ToF sensor streams. By basing a data fusion strategy on the fact that multilayer perceptrons can produce normalized confidences individually for each class, and similarly by designing information-theoretic online measures for assessing confidences of decisions, we show that appropriately chosen fusion strategies can improve overall performance to a very satisfactory level. Real-time capability is retained as the used 3D descriptors, the fusion strategy as well as the online confidence measures are computationally efficient.
This chapter describes our current research efforts related to the contextualization of learners in mobile learning activities. Substantial research in the field of mobile learning has explored aspects related to contextualized learning scenarios. However, new ways of interpretation and consideration of contextual information of mobile learners are necessary. This chapter provides an overview regarding the state of the art of innovative approaches for supporting contextualization in mobile learning. Additionally, we provide the description of the design and implementation of a flexible multi-dimensional vector space model to organize and process contextual data together with visualization tools for further analysis and interpretation. We also present a study with outcomes and insights on the usage of the contextualization support for mobile learners. To conlcude, we discuss the benefits of using contextualization models for learners in different use-cases. Moreover, a description is presented in order to illustrate how the proposed contextual model can easily be adapted and reused for different use-cases in mobile learning scenarios and potentially other mobile fields.
This chapter describes our research efforts related to the design of mobile learning (m-learning) applications in cloud-computing (CC) environments. Many cloud-based services can be used/integrated in m-learning scenarios, hence, there is a rich source of applications that could easily be applied to design and deploy those within the context of cloud-based services. Here, we present two cloud-based approaches—a flexible framework for an easy generation and deployment of mobile learning applications for teachers, and a flexible contextualization service to support personalized learning environment for mobile learners. The framework provides a flexible approach that supports teachers in designing mobile applications and automatically deploys those in order to allow teachers to create their own m-learning activities supported by mobile devices. The contextualization service is proposed to improve the content delivery of learning objects (LOs). This service allows adapting the learning content and the mobile user interface (UI) to the current context of the user. Together, this leads to a powerful and flexible framework for the provisioning of potentially ad hoc mobile learning scenarios. We provide a description of the design and implementation of two proposed cloud-based approaches together with scenario examples. Furthermore, we discuss the benefits of using flexible and contextualized cloud applications in mobile learning scenarios. Hereby, we contribute to this growing field of research by exploring new ways for designing and using flexible and contextualized cloud-based applications that support m-learning.