Springer Active Lighting and Its Application for Computer Vision: 40 Years of History of Active Lighting Techniques (Advances in Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition)

This book describes active illumination techniques in computer vision. We can classify computer vision techniques into two classes: passive and active techniques. Passive techniques observe the scene statically and analyse it as is. Active techniques give the scene some actions and try to facilitate the analysis. In particular, active illumination techniques project specific light, for which the characteristics are known beforehand, to a target scene to enable stable and accurate analysis of the scene. Traditional passive techniques have a fundamental limitation. The external world surrounding us is three-dimensional; the image projected on a retina or an imaging device is two-dimensional. That is, reduction of one dimension has occurred. Active illumination techniques compensate for the dimensional reduction by actively controlling the illumination. The demand for reliable vision sensors is rapidly increasing in many application areas, such as robotics and medical image analysis. This book explains this new endeavour to explore the augmentation of reduced dimensions in computer vision. This book consists of three parts: basic concepts, techniques, and applications. The first part explains the basic concepts for understanding active illumination techniques. In particular, the basic concepts of optics are explained so that researchers and engineers outside the field can understand the later chapters. The second part explains currently available active illumination techniques, covering many techniques developed by the authors. The final part shows how such active illumination techniques can be applied to various domains, describing the issue to be overcome by active illumination techniques and the advantages of using these techniques. This book is primarily aimed at 4th year undergraduate and 1st year graduate students, and will also help engineers from fields beyond computer vision to use active illumination techniques. Additionally, the book is suitable as course material for technical seminars. From the Back Cover   Computer vision entails both passive and active illumination techniques. Whereas passive techniques observe the scene statically and analyse it as is, by contrast active techniques give the scene some actions and try to facilitate the analysis. In particular, active illumination techniques project specific light, for which the characteristics are known beforehand, to a target scene to enable stable and accurate analysis of the scene.   Notably, traditional passive techniques have a fundamental limitation: The external world surrounding us is three-dimensional; the image projected on a retina or an imaging device is two-dimensional (That is, reduction of one dimension has occurred). Active illumination techniques compensate for the dimensional reduction by actively controlling the illumination. The demand for reliable vision sensors is rapidly increasing in many application areas, such as robotics and medical image analysis. This book explains this new endeavour to explore the augmentation of reduced dimensions in computer vision.   This pivotal volume comprehensively examines basic optics concepts, available active-lighting techniques, and various application domains.  Primarily aimed at advanced undergraduates and beginning graduates, the book also will serve as a useful guidebook for engineers from fields both in and beyond computer vision. Additionally, the book is suitable as course material for professional technical seminars.   The authors are highly experienced researchers and professors from esteemed universities, labs, institutes, and corporations in Japan.   Dr. Katsushi Ikeuchi is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research Asia, Beijing, China, and an Emeritus Professor of the University of Tokyo.   Dr. Hiroshi Kawasaki is a Professor in the Department of Advanced Information Technology and Head of the Computer Vision and Graphics Laboratory at Kyushu