COLLOQUIUM
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
University of South Carolina

Monocular Vision Modules 
for Mobile Robotics Applications

Stan Birchfield

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Clemson University

Date: October 27, 2011
Time: 1515-1615 (3:15pm-4-15pm)
Place: Swearingen 1C02 (Amoco Hall)

Abstract

The U.S. government has recently announced a major multi-year
initiative to invest in the next generation of robots. These robots
will work alongside people as co-workers, co-protectors, and
co-inhabitants.  One of the key challenges that will need to be
overcome in order to achieve this goal is sensing.  Robots need to be
able to sense not only their static environment, but also the
important objects in the environment and the humans moving about them,
both in order to interact with the world and to safely avoid
collision.  In this talk I will describe some of the work we have been
doing in our lab to develop important technologies to facilitate
mobile robotic sensing.  We developed vision modules that use
monocular vision as the input and enable the robot to follow a path,
detect and follow a person, detect doors, segment floors, avoid
obstacles, and navigate corridors.  These modules will serve as
important components in an overall robust system for domestic or other
unconstrained environments.

Stan Birchfield is an Associate Professor in the Electrical and
Computer Engineering Department of Clemson University, where he has
been since 2003.  He received a Ph.D. from Stanford University in
1999, an M.S. from Stanford in 1996, and a B.S. from Clemson in 1993,
all in Electrical Engineering.  While at Stanford, his research was
supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research
Fellowship, and he was part of the team that won first place at the
AAAI Mobile Robotics Competition of 1994.  After graduating from
Stanford, he was a research engineer with Quindi Corporation, a
startup company in Palo Alto, California, where he developed
algorithms for intelligent audio and video and was the lead engineer
and principal architect of the Meeting Companion product.  Over the
years he has worked with or consulted for various companies, including
Sun Microsystems, SRI International, Canon, Microsoft, and
Autodesk. More recently, he has been instrumental in co-founding
TrafficVision (http://www.trafficvision.com/), a South Carolina
company that uses computer vision to collect aggregate traffic
parameters automatically from live video feeds.  Dr. Birchfield has
authored or co-authored more than 50 publications in the areas of
computer vision, stereo correspondence, visual tracking, spatial
acoustics, and mobile robotics; and his open-source
Kanade-Lucas-Tomasi (KLT) feature tracker has been used by thousands
of researchers around the world.