Hideo Numagami

Three-dimensional vision techniques for an advanced robot system

This paper describes 3D vision techniques for an advanced robot system in terms of efficient hardware and practical software. Arm-controlled stereo cameras have been developed for efficient 3D sensing, whose interocular distance, yaw and tilt are under program control. Stereo vision programs are implemented with the aid of the stereo cameras and a high-speed vision processor. Knowledge-guided vision algorithms are realized in a high-level processor, where a priori knowledge regarding the environments, objects and procedure controls are utilized.

Robot vision implementation by high-speed image processor TOSPIX: Battery inspection

This paper presents an intelligent robot vision system using TOSPIX which has been newly developed to realize frequently-used and time-consuming image processing functions at low-cost and high-speed. The vision system has been studied for use in observing surface information about electric parts (dry batteries), inspecting them and then placing good ones into a given box. Three major robot vision functions are implemented here: object recognition, inspection and position determination by binary and gray-scale image processing techniques. While binary image techniques are used in battery terminal inspection and box position determination gray-scale image processing functions are performed in a label pattern check on a battery surface, front or rear surface determination, and surface defect inspection.

Application of a parallel pattern processor to remote sensing

Abstract This paper describes application techniques of satellite remote sensing using a newly developed interactive digital image processing system, where a parallel pattern processor performs characteristic roles. The pattern processor can execute several image processing functions at high speed, which are frequently used in remote sensing studies; affine transformation for geometric correction of LANDSAT MSS data to implement a satellite image database, maximum likelihood estimation for land cover classification, and pixelwise operations for change detection, etc. These application results indicate that the developed interactive image processing system is sufficiently effective to process remote-sensed data.