Depth Estimation from Stereoscopic 360-Degree Video

In this study, we present a method for all-around depth estimation from multiple omnidirectional images for indoor environments. In particular, we focus on plane-sweeping stereo as the method for depth estimation from the images. We propose a new icosahedron-based representation and ConvNets for omnidirectional images, which we name "CrownConv" because the representation resembles a crown made of origami. CrownConv can be applied to both fisheye images and equirectangular images to extract features. Furthermore, we propose icosahedron-based spherical sweeping for generating the cost volume on an icosahedron from the extracted features. The cost volume is regularized using the three-dimensional CrownConv, and the final depth is obtained by depth regression from the cost volume. Our proposed method is robust to camera alignments by using the extrinsic camera parameters; therefore, it can achieve precise depth estimation even when the camera alignment differs from that in the training dataset. We evaluate the proposed model on synthetic datasets and demonstrate its effectiveness. As our proposed method is computationally efficient, the depth is estimated from four fisheye images in less than a second using a laptop with a GPU. Therefore, it is suitable for real-world robotics applications. Our source code is available at https://github.com/matsuren/crownconv360depth.

The last decade has seen great emphasis being placed on improved safety in the workplace. Many national governments have produced safety legislation for industrial machinery. Part of the economic unification of Europe, has spawned the need to standardise many aspects of commercial business, including those regarding the provision of equipment for use in the workplace. The European Union has introduced safety legislation for machine tools in the form of the Machinery Directive (89/392/EEC). This legislation has been adopted, with the force of law, by all European Union countries (as of December 31, 1995) and within the various EFTA countries, as well.The Machinery Directive, like much of the safety related legislation in the EU, is based on the principle of risk assessment, and sets forth general requirements and limits for the protection of humans who work with, or near, the equipment. The implementation of the Directive has, in turn, caused a great need to define the interpretation of this legislation and to propose methods to meet its requirements. Further more, guidance has been sought by many on how to conduct risk assessment and how to confirm compliance.European standards organisations, CEN (Committee for European normalisation) and CENELEC (Comite de Normalisacion Electro-technique) have been in the process of developing a wide range of standards to assist with the implementation of the EU Directives. By agreement, and in co-operation with ISO (International Standards Organisation) and IEC (International Electrotechnical Committee), many standards are adopted or jointly developed for use as International Standards and European Norms. ISO and IEC international standards have been developed to meet the demand for greater detail and interpretation of the government requirements set forth in the 89/392/EEC and EN292. ISO 11553 is designed specifically for Laser Processing Machines in all industrial applications. The standard compliments the general machinery safety standard EN292 in Europe (which is Technical Report ISO/TR12100 internationally). The scope of ISO 11553 describes the hazards generated by laser processing machines and specifies safety requirements relating to radiation hazards (with reference to IEC 825) and associated hazards generated by laser processing (e.g. processing by-products)The last decade has seen great emphasis being placed on improved safety in the workplace. Many national governments have produced safety legislation for industrial machinery. Part of the economic unification of Europe, has spawned the need to standardise many aspects of commercial business, including those regarding the provision of equipment for use in the workplace. The European Union has introduced safety legislation for machine tools in the form of the Machinery Directive (89/392/EEC). This legislation has been adopted, with the force of law, by all European Union countries (as of December 31, 1995) and within the various EFTA countries, as well.The Machinery Directive, like much of the safety related legislation in the EU, is based on the principle of risk assessment, and sets forth general requirements and limits for the protection of humans who work with, or near, the equipment. The implementation of the Directive has, in turn, caused a great need to define the interpretation of this legislation an...

In the paper the features of protocols and the basic methods of organization of multimedia information transfer in telecommunication networks and distributed corporate safety networks are represented. The analysis of formats of basic elements of signals used in standards of multimedia information transfer is given.

Thirty years of international nuclear standards in ISO and IEC

To improve the depth estimation precision at the object edges, a novel depth estimation method is proposed in this paper. In the proposed method, based on the depth characteristics of the object edges, the pixels in the image are firstly classified into three categories, and then the corresponding smoothness cost functions are derived. With the modified smoothness cost functions, the depth value at the object edges with high quality can be obtained using the proposed depth estimation method. Compared with the existing depth estimation methods for the free-viewpoint television (FTV) system, the experimental results have shown that the proposed method can greatly improve the depth estimation precision for the object edges and guarantee the correctness of the edges in the synthesized virtual view at the receiver of the FTV system.

Confucius (Analects xiii:3) ‘It is not possible to have any valid argument until rigorously defined terms are agreed’. In radiation protection dosimetry, we perhaps need to take as the fundamental sources of our definitions for personal dosimetry and area monitoring, mainly those three committees—the Joint Committee for Guides in Metrology (JCGM), which gives definitions for metrology generally; the International Commission on Radiation Units and Measurements (ICRU), which gives basic physical quantities and units for ionising radiation; and the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP) for quantities considering the health effect of ionising radiation, for example effective dose, equivalent dose and the quality factor/linear energy transfer function. The JCGM, chaired by the Director of the BIPM, is formed by the seven international organisations that had prepared the original versions of the Guide to the Expression of Uncertainty in Measurement (GUM) and the International Vocabulary of Basic and General Terms in Metrology (VIM), namely the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM), the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC), the International Federation of Clinical Chemistry and Laboratory Medicine (IFCC), the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC), the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP) and the International Organization of Legal Metrology (OIML). In 2005, the International Laboratory Accreditation Cooperation (ILAC) joined the seven founder international organisations. The Joint Committee took on the work of the ISO Technical Advisory Group 4 (TAG 4), which had developed the GUM and the VIM. Two of the organisations involved in the JCGM, ISO and IEC are also jointly revising the ISO 31 series of standards as the new 80 000 series on quantities and units.

With the continuing growth of data communications — and especially the Internet and its integration with telecommunications — security matters have become increasingly important. In particular, the development of high-speed packet data communications over air interfaces and their folding into the overall converged networks present an ever increasing set of security issues for major network providers and for enterprise (information technology) environments as well. International and national standards bodies have thus focused on a broad range of subjects applicable to security. Over time, these major standards bodies have become interdependent. In this paper, we address the major efforts of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) through Joint Technical Committee 1 (JTC 1) and also the efforts of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). We undertake specifically to explain the interdependence of efforts undertaken by these organizations, whose work defines the direction in the international data and telecommunications security standards in a significant way.

Source depth estimation is always a problem in underwater acoustic area, because depth estimation is a nonlinear problem. Traditional depth estimation methods use a vertical line array, which has disadvantage of poor mobility due to the size of sensor array. In order to estimate source depth with a horizontal line array, we propose a matched-mode depth estimation method based on autoregressive (AR) wavenumber estimation for a moving source in shallow water waveguides. First, we estimate the mode wavenumbers using the improved AR modal wavenumber spectrum. Second, according to the mode wavenumber estimation, we estimate the mode amplitudes by the wavenumber spectrum, which is obtained by generalized Hankel transform. Finally, we estimate source depth estimation by the peak of source depth function wherein the data mode best matches the replica mode that is calculated using a propagation model. Compared with synthetic aperture beamforming, the proposed method exhibits a better performance in source depth estimation under low signal-to-noise ratio or the small range span. The robustness of the proposed method is illustrated by simulating the performance in mismatched environment.

Depth estimation is a crucial step for 2D/3D conversion from monoscopic video. In this paper, a novel method for depth estimation from motion with camera motion is proposed. In the proposed method, image matching using critical point filters is applied to extract the pixel-level motion field for each frame. As camera motion can bring pseudo motion vectors by image matching, and thus leading to depth ambiguity. To solve this problem, we propose to estimate the camera moving model using robust RANSAC algorithm. Then, the initial depth map is estimated by using the motion vectors without camera motion. Finally, the depth values of the pixels at the edges of moving objects are refined using a post filter based on homogeneous points. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves considerable performances on depth map in presence of camera motion.

Starting in the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) in 1978 and now taken over by the newly established Joint Technical Committee 1 (JTC 1) of ISO and the IEC (International Electrotechnical Commission), standardisation for open systems interconnection (OSI) is now a maturing activity, both in terms of the development of the standards themselves and in terms of their use in IT systems and related equipment. Consequently, work on OSI standards can now be seen as progressing in four overlapped phases: 1. completion of an initial set of communication standards; 2. filling out/evolution of the initial set of communication standards; 3. development of functional standards defining the use of the initial set of standards to meet particular needs; 4. preparation for future developments.

The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) jointly with the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) and the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) recently added new profiles for broadcast video contribution and distribution to the JPEG 2000 standard with the publishing of ISO/IEC 15444–1:2004 Amd.3:2010 and Rec. ITU-T T.800 (2002)/Amd.3 (06/2010), an amendment to JPEG 2000 core coding system. This amendment represents a major step toward a transport system for studio contribution allowing JPEG 2000 equipment from different manufacturers to interoperate. The process relies on both existing standards and new amendments from two international standard organizations (ISO) with its working groups JPEG, MPEG, and SMPTE and was developed in cooperation with studios, broadcasters, and equipment vendors. The new amendment specifies three new profiles containing a selection of encoding parameters and newly defines rate limits over seven operating levels for video encoded with JPEG 2000. The profiles and operating levels create a basis for compliance test points to ensure equipment interoperability.

This paper explains the experience of an information technology (IT) solutions provider company about the integrated management of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO)/International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) 15504 based process assets library with other related IT standards, which are ISO/IEC 27001, ISO/IEC 20000, and ISO 9001:2008. In order to establish and execute an efficient and effective infrastructure, a companywide process improvement program has been conducted. The lessons that are learned from the execution of this process improvement program, key implementation, practices and major challenges are shared in this paper. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Chapter 8 - MPEG-4 and MPEG-7

Predicting depth maps from monocular images has made an impressive performance in the past years. However, most depth estimation methods are trained with paired image-depth map data or multi-view images (e.g., stereo pair and monocular sequence), which suffer from expensive annotation costs and poor transferability. Although unsupervised domain adaptation methods are introduced to mitigate the reliance on annotated data, rare works focus on the unsupervised cross-scenario indoor monocular depth estimation. In this article, we propose to study the generalization of depth estimation models across different indoor scenarios in an adversarial-based domain adaptation paradigm. Concretely, a domain discriminator is designed for discriminating the representation from source and target domains, while the feature extractor aims to confuse the domain discriminator by capturing domain-invariant features. Further, we reconstruct depth maps from latent representations with the supervision of labeled source data. As a result, the feature extractor learned features possess the merit of both domain-invariant and low source risk, and the depth estimator can deal with the domain shift between source and target domains. We conduct the cross-scenario and cross-dataset experiments on the ScanNet and NYU-Depth-v2 datasets to verify the effectiveness of our method and achieve impressive performance.

A method of range and depth estimation was studied using a single hydrophone based on the dispersive characteristic and time-frequency analysis for low frequency underwater acoustic pulse signals in shallow water environment. First, the signal received on a single hydrophone can be decomposed into a series of modes within the frame work of normal mode theory, and then the dispersive characteristic of the propagating modes can be analyzed using the time-frequency analysis. In order to improve the time-frequency resolution, the use of the time-frequency distribution with adaptive radial-Gaussian kernel extracts the arrival time difference of propagating modes in dispersion curve, which can be used to estimate source range. Mode energy can be extracted using binary time-frequency mask filtering based on multi-mode joint matching processing; and the source depth can be estimated by comparing the differences of the mode energy of the real data and simulated replica data, yielding a contrast function. Simulation results from a shallow-water Pekeris waveguide show that the time-frequency distribution with adaptive radial-Gaussian kernel represents well the dispersion characteristics of the underwater acoustic pulse signals, provides higher time-frequency resolution and overcomes the problem of the inherent limit for the time resolution and frequency resolution in the traditional short-time Fourier transform, so that the modes can be separated and identified more easily in the time-frequency plane. From the result of the range estimation, the different mode combinations have different results of the range estimation. The range estimation result can be obtained accurately by using the mode with high energy in the time-frequency plane. The relative error in range estimation is less than 2% by using the mode with high energy. In terms of the depth estimation, the more the number of joint matching mode, the more sharp peak and low fake peaks the contrast function has, so that the depth estimation is further improved by incorporating more modes. This research has great significance for studying the extraction and separation of low frequency underwater acoustic pulse signals.