Section: Research Program

Multiple-camera acquisition of visual data

Modern computer vision techniques and applications require the deployment of a large number of cameras linked to a powerful multi-PC computing platform. Therefore, such a system must fulfill the following requirements: The cameras must be synchronized up to the millisecond, the bandwidth associated with image transfer (from the sensor to the computer memory) must be large enough to allow the transmission of uncompressed images at video rates, and the computing units must be able to dynamically store the data and/to process them in real-time.

Current camera acquisition systems are all-digital ones. They are based on standard network communication protocols such as the IEEE 1394. Recent systems involve as well depth cameras that produce depth images, i.e. a depth information at each pixel. Popular technologies for this purpose include the Time of Flight Cameras (TOF cam) and structured light cameras, as in the very recent Microsoft's Kinect device.