The main goal of this project is to develop a new system for information fusion in image understanding which can deal with the selection and combination of uncertain visual information. The system is active in the sense that at each step of processing it can select and request the most promising next source of information. Thus, it will be a powerful new mechanism for the efficient control of an image understanding system. This is a long-term activity carried out jointly with the Object Reconstruction Group funded by annual grants from the Austrian Ministry of Science. We aim at the integration of photogrammetric 3D object reconstruction and 2D object interpretation and recognition, using computer graphics for visualization.
Applications range from cyber city to reverse engineering, virtual museum, and augmented reality.
The microscopic inspection of steel specimen by human metallographers has previously been used for the assessment and control of steel quality. The task here is to model so-called carbide distributions as scaled texture, and to use a computer controllable microscope to find the most significant part of the specimen, and to select the magnification, focus and lighting conditions. Endoscopic images are taken to monitor the combustion process in the cylinder of Diesel engines. A significant image sequence has to be recovered from stochastic sampling of a stochastic cyclical combustion process. Further goals of this project are the calculation of flame temperature and propagation speed, and the measurement of soot concentration.