Wang, Bin; Benli, Emrah; Motai, Yuichi; Dong, Lili; Xu, Wenhai

This paper addresses a problem on infrared maritime target detection robustly in various situations. Its main contribution is to improve the infrared maritime target detection accuracy in different backgrounds, for various targets, using multiple infrared wave bands. The accuracy and the computational time of traditional infrared maritime searching systems are improved by our proposed Local Peak Singularity Measurement (LPSM)-Based Image Enhancement and Grayscale Distribution Curve Shift Binarization (GDCSB)-Based Target Segmentation. The first part uses LPSM to quantize the local singularity of each peak. Additionally, an enhancement map (EM) is generated based on the quantitative local singularity. After multiplying the original image by the EM, targets can be enhanced and the background will be suppressed. The second part of GDCSB-Based Target Segmentation calculates the desired threshold by cyclic shift of the grayscale distribution curve (GDC) of the enhanced image. After binarizing the enhanced image, real targets can be segmented from the image background. To verify the proposed algorithm, experiments based on 13,625 infrared maritime images and five comparison algorithms were conducted. Results show that the proposed algorithm has solid performance in strong and weak background clutters, different wave bands, different maritime targets, etc.

Benli, Emrah; Motai, Yuichi; Rogers, John

Visual perception is an important component for human-robot interaction processes in robotic systems. Interaction between humans and robots depends on the reliability of the robotic vision systems. The variation of camera sensors and the capability of these sensors to detect many types of sensory inputs improve the visual perception. The analysis of activities, motions, skills, and behaviors of humans and robots have been addressed by utilizing the heat signatures of the human body. The human motion behavior is analyzed by body movement kinematics, and the trajectory of the target is used to identify the objects and the human target in the omnidirectional (O-D) thermal images. The process of human target identification and gesture recognition by traditional sensors have problem for multitarget scenarios since these sensors may not keep all targets in their narrow field of view (FOV) at the same time. O-D thermal view increases the robots' line-of-sights and ability to obtain better perception in the absence of light. The human target is informed of its position, surrounding objects and any other human targets in its proximity so that humans with limited vision or vision disability can be assisted to improve their ability in their environment. The proposed method helps to identify the human targets in a wide FOV and light independent conditions to assist the human target and improve the human-robot and robot-robot interactions. The experimental results show that the identification of the human targets is achieved with a high accuracy.

Benli, Emrah; Spidalieri, Richard Lee; Motai, Yuichi

Collaborative robotic configurations for monitoring and tracking human targets have attracted interest in the fourth industrial revolution. The fusion of different types of sensors embedded in collaborative robotic systems achieves high-quality information and contributes to significantly improve robotic perception. However, current methods have not deeply explored the capabilities of thermal multisensory configurations in human-oriented tasks. In this paper, we propose thermal multisensor fusion (TMF) for collaborative robots to overcome the limitations of stand-alone robots. Thermal vision helps to utilize the heat signature of the human body for human-oriented tracking. An omnidirectional (O-D) infrared (IR) sensor provides a wide field of view (FOV) to detect human targets, and Stereo IR helps determine the distance of the human target in the oriented direction. The fusion of O-D IR and Stereo IR also creates a multisensor stereo for an additional determination of the distance to the target. The fusion of thermal and O-D sensors brings their limited prediction accuracy with their advantages. The maximum a posteriori method is used to predict the distance of the target with high accuracy by using the distance results of TMF stereo from multiple platforms according to the reliability of the sensors rather than its usage of visible-band-based tracking methods. The proposed method tracks the distance calculation of each sensor instead of target trajectory tracking as in visible-band methods. We proved that TMF increases the perception of robots by offering a wide FOV and provides precise target localization for collaborative robots.