Abstract
With the goal of supporting close-range observation tasks of a spherical amphibious robot, such as ecological observations and intelligent surveillance, a moving target detection and tracking system was designed and implemented in this study. Given the restrictions presented by the amphibious environment and the small-sized spherical amphibious robot, an industrial camera and vision algorithms using adaptive appearance models were adopted to construct the proposed system. To handle the problem of light scattering and absorption in the underwater environment, the multi-scale retinex with color restoration algorithm was used for image enhancement. Given the environmental disturbances in practical amphibious scenarios, the Gaussian mixture model was used to detect moving targets entering the field of view of the robot. A fast compressive tracker with a Kalman prediction mechanism was used to track the specified target. Considering the limited load space and the unique mechanical structure of the robot, the proposed vision system was fabricated with a low power system-on-chip using an asymmetric and heterogeneous computing architecture. Experimental results confirmed the validity and high efficiency of the proposed system. The design presented in this paper is able to meet future demands of spherical amphibious robots in biological monitoring and multi-robot cooperation.
Highlights
With the increased interest in ocean exploitation activities, amphibious robots have become essential tools for applications such as ecological observations and military reconnaissance in littoral regions [1,2]
Focusing on the tasks of ecological observations and intelligent surveillance in littoral regions, a moving target detection and tracking system was proposed for our amphibious spherical robot in this study
The study in this paper provided a reference design to vision systems of small-sized amphibious robots
Summary
With the increased interest in ocean exploitation activities, amphibious robots have become essential tools for applications such as ecological observations and military reconnaissance in littoral regions [1,2]. Inspired by the deformable part model technique, the algorithm outperformed the recent tracking-by-detection algorithms for tracking one or multiple live fish in challenging underwater videos It could provide a frame rate lower than 1 fps, which limited its applications in mobile robotic platforms. Most existing robotic detection and tracking systems adopted vision algorithms using static or coarse appearance models [13,18], making them only capable of effectively processing specific targets such as fish and beacons under the specific scenes. Focusing on the tasks of ecological observations and intelligent surveillance in littoral regions, a moving target detection and tracking system was proposed for our amphibious spherical robot in this study.
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have