LightBot: A Multi-Light Position Robotic Acquisition System for Adaptive Capturing of Cultural Heritage Surfaces.

Multi-light acquisitions and modeling are well-studied techniques for characterizing surface geometry, widely used in the cultural heritage field. Current systems that are used to perform this kind of acquisition are mainly free-form or dome-based. Both of them have constraints in terms of reproducibility, limitations on the size of objects being acquired, speed, and portability. This paper presents a novel robotic arm-based system design, which we call LightBot, as well as its applications in reflectance transformation imaging (RTI) in particular. The proposed model alleviates some of the limitations observed in the case of free-form or dome-based systems. It allows the automation and reproducibility of one or a series of acquisitions adapting to a given surface in two-dimensional space.

Surface Reflectance: an Optical Method for Multiscale Curvature Characterization of Wear on Ceramic-Metal Composites.

Surface gradient characterization by light reflectance (SGCLR) is used for the first time for multiscale curvature calculations and discrimination of worn surfaces on six damaged ceramic-metal composites. Measurements are made using reflectance transformation imaging (RTI). Slope and curvature maps, generated from RTI, are analyzed instead of heights. From multiscale decompositions, bootstrapping, and analysis of variance (ANOVA), a strong correlation (R² = 0.90) is found between the density of furrows of Mehlum curvatures, with a band pass filter at 5.4 µm, present in ceramic grains and their mechanical properties. A strong correlation is found between the mean curvatures of the metal and the ceramics, with a high pass filter at 1286 µm.

Remote photoplethysmography with constrained ICA using periodicity and chrominance constraints.

BACKGROUND: Remote photoplethysmography (rPPG) has been in the forefront recently for measuring cardiac pulse rates from live or recorded videos. It finds advantages in scenarios requiring remote monitoring, such as medicine and fitness, where contact based monitoring is limiting and cumbersome. The blood volume pulse, defined as the pulsative flow of arterial blood, gives rise to periodic changes in the skin color which are then quantified to estimate a temporal signal. This temporal signal can be analysed using various methods to extract the representative cardiac signal. METHODS: We present a novel method for measuring rPPG signals using constrained independent component analysis (cICA). We incorporate a priori information into the cICA algorithm to aid in the extraction of the most prominent rPPG signal. This a priori information is implemented using two constraints: first, based on periodicity using autocorrelation, and second, a chrominance-based constraint exploiting the physical characteristics of the skin. RESULTS AND CONCLUSION: Our method showed improved performances over traditional blind source separation methods like ICA and chrominance based methods with mean absolute errors of 0.62 beats per minute (BPM) and 3.14 BPM for the two datasets in our inhouse video database UBFC-RPPG, and 4.69 BPM for the public MMSE-HR dataset. Its performance was also better in comparison to other state of the art methods in terms of accuracy and robustness. Our UBFC-RPPG database is also made publicly available and is specifically aimed towards testing rPPG measurements.

A sensor-data-based denoising framework for hyperspectral images.

Many denoising approaches extend image processing to a hyperspectral cube structure, but do not take into account a sensor model nor the format of the recording. We propose a denoising framework for hyperspectral images that uses sensor data to convert an acquisition to a representation facilitating the noise-estimation, namely the photon-corrected image. This photon corrected image format accounts for the most common noise contributions and is spatially proportional to spectral radiance values. The subsequent denoising is based on an extended variational denoising model, which is suited for a Poisson distributed noise. A spatially and spectrally adaptive total variation regularisation term accounts the structural proposition of a hyperspectral image cube. We evaluate the approach on a synthetic dataset that guarantees a noise-free ground truth, and the best results are achieved when the dark current is taken into account.