Research on Calibration Method of Binocular Vision System Based on Neural Network

In binocular vision inspection system, the calibration of detection equipment is the basis to ensure the subsequent detection accuracy. The current calibration methods have the disadvantages of complex calculation, low precision, and poor operability. In order to solve the above problems, the calibration method of binocular camera, the correction method of lens distortion, and the calibration method of projector in the binocular vision system based on surface structured light are studied in this paper. For lens distortion correction, on the basis of analyzing the traditional correction methods, a distortion correction method based on radial basis function neural network is proposed. Using the excellent nonlinear mapping ability of RBF neural network, the distortion correction models of different lenses can be obtained quickly. It overcomes the defect that the traditional correction model cannot adjust adaptively with the type of lens. The experimental results show that the accuracy of the method can meet the requirements of system calibration.

Three-Dimensional Reconstruction of Welding Pool Surface by Binocular Vision

Current research of binocular vision systems mainly need to resolve the camera’s intrinsic parameters before the reconstruction of three-dimensional (3D) objects. The classical Zhang’ calibration is hardly to calculate all errors caused by perspective distortion and lens distortion. Also, the image-matching algorithm of the binocular vision system still needs to be improved to accelerate the reconstruction speed of welding pool surfaces. In this paper, a preset coordinate system was utilized for camera calibration instead of Zhang’ calibration. The binocular vision system was modified to capture images of welding pool surfaces by suppressing the strong arc interference during gas metal arc welding. Combining and improving the algorithms of speeded up robust features, binary robust invariant scalable keypoints, and KAZE, the feature information of points (i.e., RGB values, pixel coordinates) was extracted as the feature vector of the welding pool surface. Based on the characteristics of the welding images, a mismatch-elimination algorithm was developed to increase the accuracy of image-matching algorithms. The world coordinates of matching feature points were calculated to reconstruct the 3D shape of the welding pool surface. The effectiveness and accuracy of the reconstruction of welding pool surfaces were verified by experimental results. This research proposes the development of binocular vision algorithms that can reconstruct the surface of welding pools accurately to realize intelligent welding control systems in the future.

Eye Gaze Based 3D Triangulation for Robotic Bionic Eyes

Three-dimensional (3D) triangulation based on active binocular vision has increasing amounts of applications in computer vision and robotics. An active binocular vision system with non-fixed cameras needs to calibrate the stereo extrinsic parameters online to perform 3D triangulation. However, the accuracy of stereo extrinsic parameters and disparity have a significant impact on 3D triangulation precision. We propose a novel eye gaze based 3D triangulation method that does not use stereo extrinsic parameters directly in order to reduce the impact. Instead, we drive both cameras to gaze at a 3D spatial point P at the optical center through visual servoing. Subsequently, we can obtain the 3D coordinates of P through the intersection of the two optical axes of both cameras. We have performed experiments to compare with previous disparity based work, named the integrated two-pose calibration (ITPC) method, using our robotic bionic eyes. The experiments show that our method achieves comparable results with ITPC.

BINOCULAR VISUAL ENVIRONMENT PERCEPTION TECHNOLOGY FOR UNMANNED SURFACE VEHICLE

Binocular vision system is an essential way for target localization in many fields, which has been widely used as payload of unmanned surface vehicles (USV). High resolution cameras, which can provide richer information, are utilized more often on a USV. This brings challenges of computing tremendous data for target detection and localization in real-time. In this paper, we propose an framework to automatically detect and localize target using high resolution binocular cameras for environment perception of USV. Instead of processing the whole image, the feature extraction and matching are executed within the target region of interest determined by a deep convolution network. Then the target can be localized using triangulation principle with calibrated binocular camera parameters. Experiments show that our proposed strategy can achieve both precise detection and high accurate localization results in real-time applications.