Binbin Xu, Department of Precision Engineering, wins a JSME Fellow Award for Outstanding Young Engineers

 On 9Th June 2016, Dr. Binbin Xu, Department of Precision Engineering, wins a JSME (Japan Society of Mechanical Engineers) Fellow Award for Outstanding Young Engineers. The award is provided to those who gave a great presentation at a conference held by JSME.

<About awarded research>

 In order to inspect the cracks on the aging infrastructures for rehabilitating and replacing, flying robots are used to access to the high locations where it is dangerous for people to get access. Omnidirectional camera is used here for its 360 degree field of view. This paper focuses on a common problem that the omnidirectional camera will cause, the robot body occlusion. Although omnidirectional cameras could give much more information than normal cameras, this drawback would decrease the accuracy of motion estimation and 3D reconstruction.
 Regarding this problem, this study focuses on utilizing prior knowledge of robot body’s color and shape to segment the occlusion and then employs abundant information in spatio-temporal filed of the video to remove the occlusion. To deal with the distortion and discontinuity in the omnidirectional image, this paper further proposes an approximate shape fitting method to update parameters. The method was verified in the complex environment indoor with other moving noise and further verified under a real concrete bridge.

<Comments>

 It's a great honor to receive this award as a young researcher. I would like to thank my supervisors, Prof. Hajime Asama, Assoc. Prof. Atsushi Yamashita, and laboratory members. I will do my best to improve our method. I am going to keep on studying computer vision and robotics to generalize our method to more kinds of robot occlusion that will be met in the robot inspection.