Colorized Ranging Sensor
This project is developing a "pseudosensor" composed
of an active scanning ladar and a passive aperture such as a color,
black & white, or infrared camera. The pseudosensor appears to
be a single sensor producing "colorized range" imagery.
The figure opposite illustrates colorized range imagery. The top image is color (actually black and white
here) and the bottom image is a range image of identical size where the
range values are represented as greyscale values. The key thing is that
the range values are the ranges from the camera to the points in
the scene corresponding to the pixels int he top image. Hence, we have
a registered representation of both appearance and shape.
Concept
Given that scanning laser range data is about an order of magnitude
less dense than camera data (in one dimension), there are two ways to
approach the problem.
Other difficult aspects of the problem include
computing the correspondences between the two data streams. This is
especially difficult to doon a on a moving platform.
Applications
We use such data profitably in robot perception algorithms because it
allows the robot to do things like discriminate a rock from a bush. We
also use such data to produce immersive operator interfaces.
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