CardEye: Active Vision System for Surface Reconstruction

	
		Aly A. Farag, Ph.D.
	Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering
	Director, Computer Vision & Image Processing Laboratory
	CVIP Lab, Rm 412 Lutz Hall
	University of Louisville, Louisville, KY 40292
	Phone: (502) 852-7510, Fax: (502) 852-1580/6807
	e-mail: farag@cairo.uofl.edu
	URL: http://www.cvip.uofl.edu



Abstract:

The CardEye is an experimental, trinocular, 3D active vision system. It has
been built to create a flexible, precise tool for active vision research. The
system uses an agile trinocular vision head mounted on a robotic arm. It has
five degrees of freedom:  pan, tilt, roll, vergence and variable baseline in
addition to the automated zoom and focus of the lenses. It utilizes an active
lighting device to assist in the surface reconstruction process, which starts
with solving for the optimal settings of system parameters (base distance,
vergence, zoom and focus) to image a particular object. Knowing the camera
model parameters, a multi-stage reconstruction approach integrates edge-based
stereo, area-based stereo and structured light so it can handle a variety of
object surface characteristics.

This talk will present an overview of the CardEye system design and
functionality. We will present results for 3D Object reconstruction using the
system and research directions at the CVIP Lab in the area of active vision.

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Aly A. Farag received his Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from Purdue
University in 1990. He is currently an Associate Professor of Electrical and
Computer Engineering at the University of Louisville and Director of the
Computer Vision and Image Processing Laboratory (CVIP Lab).  Since 1995 Dr.
Farag has supervised over 15 graduate students and postdocs, and directed over
10 funded projects from the NSF, DoD, NIH and other organizations. Dr. Farag's
research interests include active vision, medical imaging and stochastic
processes. Dr. Farag is a Senior Member of the IEEE and SME. He is an Associate
Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Image Processing.