This research instrumentation enables research projects in: - Video Analysis and Sensor Control in Distributed Heterogeneous Networks, - Automatic Site Model Acquisition and Reconstruction, - Real-Time Synthetic Environment Visualization and User-Guided Error Correction, and - Real-Time Depth Warping for Unstructured Visualization Environments.
This award supports on-going research in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Kentucky and contributes to the purchase of three components: Active-Control Stereo Vision Sensor Platform, High Performance Image Processing Compute Server, and a Real-Time Visualization Environment. The video analysis and reconstruction project seeks to develop distributed real-time approaches to large-scale video and image based problems. The project utilizes three component platforms connected by a high-speed computer network: an active sensor platform, a distributed high performance computing environment, and a flexible real-time display system. The overall goal of sensing, reconstructing, and visualizing an environment in real-time leads to several specific problems that require the use of one or more of the platforms. The active sensor platform allows investigation of sensor control and issues in the compression and communication of large-scale image data. Typically, datasets may contain thousands of images of a complex environment. A high-performance computing platform, in conjunction with sophisticated computer vision algorithms, is necessary for the reconstruction of these environments in real-time. The flexible display system enables research in the visualization of synthetic environments. Sophisticated user interaction with the model can lead to model improvement by the communication of user-indicated errors from the visualization platform to the sensor platform for the acquisition of new data, or to the compute server, for reprocessing of the data in light of the new information. This real-time interaction between platforms is facilitated via the high-speed network.
