Hybrid Methods for Robust Irradiance Analysis and 3-D Shape Reconstruction from Images

The analysis of the differential structure of images is an interesting task in machine vision, among other reasons because it can provide relevant featural representation of images, suited for higher level information processing task like geometry reconstruction and object recognition. The importance of invariants of the field of isophotae on lambertian surfaces in shape perception by means of chiaroscuro is discussed in (Koenderink and Van Doom, 1980). In their approach to shape from shading, (Breton et al, 1992) represent the shading of the image by means of its shading flow field, i.e. by the first order differential structure of the image expressed as the isoluminance direction and grad…

Population and Query Interface for a Content-Based Video Database

In this paper we describe the first full implementation of a content-based indexing and retrieval system for MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 videos. We consider a video as a collection of spatiotemporal segments called video objects; each video object is a sequence of video object planes. A set of representative video object planes is used to index each video object. During the database population, the operator, using a semi-automatic outlining tool we developed, manually selects video objects and insert some semantical information. Low-level visual features like color, texture, motion and geometry are automatically computed. The system has been implemented on a commercial relational DBMS and is based on…

An Artificial Soft Somatosensory System for a Cognitive Robot

The paper proposes an artificial somatosensory system loosely inspired by human beings' biology and embedded in a cognitive architecture (CA). It enables a robot to receive the stimulation from its embodiment, and use these sensations, we called roboceptions, to behave according to both the external environment and the internal robot status. In such a way, the robot is aware of its body and able to interpret physical sensations can be more effective in the task while maintaining its well being. The robot's physiological urges are tightly bound to the specific physical state of the robot. Positive and negative physical information can, therefore, be processed and let the robot behave in a mo…

Artificial Pleasure and Pain Antagonism Mechanism in a Social Robot

The goal of the work is to build some Python modules that allow the Nao robot to emulate a somatosensorial system similar to the human one. Assuming it can perceive some feelings similar to the ones recognized by the human system, it will be possible to make it react appropriately to the external stimuli. The idea is to have a group of software sensors working simultaneously, providing some feedback to show how the robot is feeling at a particular time. It will be able to feel articular pain and stress, to perceive people in his surroundings (and in a future work to react according to the knowledge of them with face recognition), feel pleasure by recognizing caresses on his head and respond…

Neural networks as soft sensors: a comparison in a real world application

A Neural Architecture for 3D Segmentation

An original neural scheme for segmentation of range data is presented, which is part of a more general 3D vision system for robotic applications. The entire process relies on a neural architecture aimed to perform first order image irradiance analysis, that is local estimation of magnitude and orientation of the image irradiance gradient.

Roboception and adaptation in a cognitive robot

In robotics, perception is usually oriented at understanding what is happening in the external world, while few works pay attention to what is occurring in the robot’s body. In this work, we propose an artificial somatosensory system, embedded in a cognitive architecture, that enables a robot to perceive the sensations from its embodiment while executing a task. We called these perceptions roboceptions, and they let the robot act according to its own physical needs in addition to the task demands. Physical information is processed by the robot to behave in a balanced way, determining the most appropriate trade-off between the achievement of the task and its well being. The experiments show …