Technologies in Robotic Systems

Object Positioning and Tracking with Multi-camera Systems for Light Field Photography

Light field photography systems compute single images with differing foci an image data set that has been captured once. Multi-camera systems or single cameras with segmented lenses supply the images.

The Fraunhofer IFF’s Robotic Systems Business Unit a source of images based on a multi-camera system consisting of nine single cameras. Special software synthesizes different images from a virtually focusable camera from the data captured one time. Since the diameter of the camera array is large and thus the aperture of the synthetic camera is very large, the images generated have a very small depth of field.

A supporting distributed software system also accommodates the problem of scarce processing resources (computing time and communication channel capacity), which hampers the processing of sensor data, especially in scenarios that integrate mobile systems. This problem was solved or lessened by implementing a mechanism with selective attention that reduces both quantities of data and computing times as a function of the situation. Upgrading JPEG standards with a locally adaptive compression rate compatible with existing software further reduces the data streams processed. This makes it possible to determine the location and position of objects and to track them using a distributed system that iteratively optimizes the focus of feature points in data sets captured once.