The aim of this work is to develop research on 3D building modeling. In particular, the research in aerial-based 3D building reconstruction is a topic very developed since 1990. However, it is necessary to pursue the research since the actual approaches for 3D massive building reconstruction (although efficient) still encounter problems in generalization, coherency, accuracy. Besides, the recent developments of street acquisition systems such as Mobile Mapping Systems open new perspectives for improvements in building modeling in the sense that the terrestrial data (very dense and accurate) can be exploited with more performance (in comparison to the aerial investigation) to enrich the building models at facade level (e.g., geometry, texturing). Hence, aerial and terrestrial based building modeling approaches are individually proposed. At aerial level, we describe a direct and featureless approach for simple polyhedral building reconstruction from a set of ...

The usage of inertial sensors has traditionally been confined primarily to the aviation and marine industry due to their associated cost and bulkiness. During the last decade, however, inertial sensors have undergone a rather dramatic reduction in both size and cost with the introduction of MEMS technology. As a result of this trend, inertial sensors have become commonplace for many applications and can even be found in many consumer products, for instance smart phones, cameras and game consoles. Due to the drift inherent in inertial technology, inertial sensors are typically used in combination with aiding sensors to stabilize andimprove the estimates. The need for aiding sensors becomes even more apparent due to the reduced accuracy of MEMS inertial sensors. This thesis discusses two problems related to using inertial sensors in combination with aiding sensors. The first is the problem of ...

Recent improvements in the development of inertial and visual sensors allow building small, lightweight, and cheap motion capture systems, which are becoming a standard feature of smartphones and personal digital assistants. This dissertation describes developments of new motion sensing strategies using the inertial and inertial-visual sensors. The thesis contributions are presented in two parts. The first part focuses mainly on the use of inertial measurement units. First, the problem of sensor calibration is addressed and a low-cost and accurate method to calibrate the accelerometer cluster of this unit is proposed. The method is based on the maximum likelihood estimation framework, which results in a minimum variance unbiased estimator.Then using the inertial measurement unit, a probabilistic user-independent method is proposed for pedestrian activity classification and gait analysis.The work targets two groups of applications including human activity classificationand joint human activity and ...

Mapping stationary objects and tracking moving targets are essential for many autonomous functions in vehicles. In order to compute the map and track estimates, sensor measurements from radar, laser and camera are used together with the standard proprioceptive sensors present in a car. By fusing information from different types of sensors, the accuracy and robustness of the estimates can be increased. Different types of maps are discussed and compared in the thesis. In particular, road maps make use of the fact that roads are highly structured, which allows relatively simple and powerful models to be employed. It is shown how the information of the lane markings, obtained by a front looking camera, can be fused with inertial measurement of the vehicle motion and radar measurements of vehicles ahead to compute a more accurate and robust road geometry estimate. Further, it ...

This thesis discusses approaches and techniques to convert Sparsely-Sampled Light Fields (SSLFs) into Densely-Sampled Light Fields (DSLFs), which can be used for visualization on 3DTV and Virtual Reality (VR) devices. Exemplarily, a movable 1D large-scale light field acquisition system for capturing SSLFs in real-world environments is evaluated. This system consists of 24 sparsely placed RGB cameras and two Kinect V2 sensors. The real-world SSLF data captured with this setup can be leveraged to reconstruct real-world DSLFs. To this end, three challenging problems require to be solved for this system: (i) how to estimate the rigid transformation from the coordinate system of a Kinect V2 to the coordinate system of an RGB camera; (ii) how to register the two Kinect V2 sensors with a large displacement; (iii) how to reconstruct a DSLF from a SSLF with moderate and large disparity ranges. ...

In recent years, inertial sensors have undergone major developments. The quality of their measurements has improved while their cost has decreased, leading to an increase in availability. They can be found in stand-alone sensor units, so-called inertial measurement units, but are nowadays also present in for instance any modern smartphone, in Wii controllers and in virtual reality headsets. The term inertial sensor refers to the combination of accelerometers and gyroscopes. These measure the external specific force and the angular velocity, respectively. Integration of their measurements provides information about the sensor’s position and orientation. However, the position and orientation estimates obtained by simple integration suffer from drift and are therefore only accurate on a short time scale. In order to improve these estimates, we combine the inertial sensors with additional sensors and models. To combine these different sources of information, also ...

In this dissertation, a novel scheme performing 3D reconstruction of a scene from a 2D video sequence is presented. To this aim, first, the trajectories of the salient features in the scene are determined as a sequence of displacements via Kanade-Lukas-Tomasi tracker and Kalman filter. Then, a tentative camera trajectory with respect to a metric reference reconstruction is estimated. All frame pairs are ordered with respect to their amenability to 3D reconstruction by a metric that utilizes the baseline distances and the number of tracked correspondences between the frames. The ordered frame pairs are processed via a sequential structure-from- motion algorithm to estimate the sparse structure and camera matrices. The metric and the associated reconstruction algorithm are shown to outperform their counterparts in the literature via experiments. Finally, a mesh-based, rate- distortion efficient representation is constructed through a novel procedure ...

In the modern world, we are increasingly surrounded by computation devices with communication links and one or more microphones. Such devices are, for example, smartphones, tablets, laptops or hearing aids. These devices can work together as nodes in an acoustic sensor network (ASN). Such networks are a growing platform that opens the possibility for many practical applications. ASN based speech enhancement, source localization, and event detection can be applied for teleconferencing, camera control, automation, or assisted living. For this kind of applications, the awareness of auditory objects and their spatial positioning are key properties. In order to provide these two kinds of information, novel methods have been developed in this thesis. Information on the type of auditory objects is provided by a novel real-time sound classification method. Information on the position of human speakers is provided by a novel localization ...

Nowadays, richer 3D visual representation formats are emerging, notably light fields and point clouds. These formats enable new applications in many usage domains, notably virtual and augmented reality, geographical information systems, immersive communications, and cultural heritage. Recently, following major improvements in 3D visual data acquisition, there is an increasing interest in point-based visual representation, which models real-world objects as a cloud of sampled points on their surfaces. Point cloud is a 3D representation model where the real visual world is represented by a set of 3D coordinates (the geometry) over the objects with some additional attributes such as color and normals. With the advances in 3D acquisition systems, it is now possible to capture a realistic point cloud to represent a visual scene with a very high resolution. These point clouds may have up to billions of points and, thus, ...

The dissertation deals with the problems of stereoscopic depth estimation and coding in multiview video systems, which are vital for development of the next generation three-dimensional television. The depth estimation algorithms known from literature, along with theoretical foundations are discussed. The problem of estimation of depth maps with high quality, expressed by means of accuracy, precision and temporal consistency, has been stated. Next, original solutions have been proposed. Author has proposed a novel, theoretically founded approach to depth estimation which employs Maximum A posteriori Probability (MAP) rule for modeling of the cost function used in optimization algorithms. The proposal has been presented along with a method for estimation of parameters of such model. In order to attain that, an analysis of the noise existing in multiview video and a study of inter-view correlation of corresponding samples of pictures have been ...

Communicating with mobile devices has become an unavoidable part of our daily life. Unfortunately, the current user interface designs are mostly taken directly from desktop computers. This has resulted in devices that are sometimes hard to use. Since more processing power and new sensing technologies are already available, there is a possibility to develop systems to communicate through different modalities. This thesis proposes some novel computer vision approaches, including head tracking, object motion analysis and device ego-motion estimation, to allow efficient interaction with mobile devices. For head tracking, two new methods have been developed. The first method detects a face region and facial features by employing skin detection, morphology, and a geometrical face model. The second method, designed especially for mobile use, detects the face and eyes using local texture features. In both cases, Kalman filtering is applied to estimate ...

Progressive developments in computing and sensor technologies during the past decades have enabled the formulation of increasingly advanced problems in statistical inference and signal processing. The thesis is concerned with statistical estimation methods, and is divided into three parts with focus on two different areas: sensor fusion and sparse signal processing. The first part introduces the well-established Bayesian, Fisherian and least-squares estimation frameworks, and derives new estimators. Specifically, the Bayesian framework is applied in two different classes of estimation problems: scenarios in which (i) the signal covariances themselves are subject to uncertainties, and (ii) distance bounds are used as side information. Applications include localization, tracking and channel estimation. The second part is concerned with the extraction of useful information from multiple sensors by exploiting their joint properties. Two sensor configurations are considered here: (i) a monocular camera and an inertial ...

In this thesis, a number of novel watermarking techniques for different 3D representations are presented. A novel watermarking method is proposed for the mono-view video, which might be interpreted as the basic implicit representation of 3D scenes. The proposed method solves the common flickering problem in the existing video watermarking schemes by means of adjusting the watermark strength with respect to temporal contrast thresholds of human visual system (HVS), which define the maximum invisible distortions in the temporal direction. The experimental results indicate that the proposed method gives better results in both objective and subjective measures, compared to some recognized methods in the literature. The watermarking techniques for the geometry and image based representations of 3D scenes, denoted as 3D watermarking, are examined and classified into three groups, as 3D-3D, 3D-2D and 2D-2D watermarking, in which the pair of symbols ...

In direction finding (DF) applications, there are several factors affecting the estimation accuracy of the direction-of-arrivals (DOA) of unknown source locations. The major distortions in the estimation process are due to the array imperfections, model mismatches and multipath. The array imperfections usually exist in practical applications due to the nonidealities in the antenna array such as mutual coupling (MC) and gain/phase uncertainties. The model mismatches usually occur when the model of the received signal differs from the signal model used in the processing stage of the DF system. Another distortion is due to multipath signals. In the multipath scenario, the antenna array receives the transmitted signal from more than one path with different directions and the array covariance matrix is rank-deficient. In this thesis, three new methods are proposed for the problems in DF applications in the presence of array ...

This thesis contributes to motion characterization through inertial and physiological signals captured by wearable devices and analyzed using signal processing and deep learning techniques. This research leverages the possibilities of motion analysis for three main applications: to know what physical activity a person is performing (Human Activity Recognition), to identify who is performing that motion (user identification) or know how the movement is being performed (motor anomaly detection). Most previous research has addressed human motion modeling using invasive sensors in contact with the user or intrusive sensors that modify the user’s behavior while performing an action (cameras or microphones). In this sense, wearable devices such as smartphones and smartwatches can collect motion signals from users during their daily lives in a less invasive or intrusive way. Recently, there has been an exponential increase in research focused on inertial-signal processing to ...