Luca Bombini | Università degli Studi di Parma (Italy) (original) (raw)

Papers by Luca Bombini

Springer eBooks, 2009

This chapter addresses the most important issues involved in the selection, installation, and cal... more This chapter addresses the most important issues involved in the selection, installation, and calibration of a camera system onboard a vehicle, taking into consideration all the specific characteristics of the automotive environment and the requirements of the various applications.

Springer eBooks, 2009

This paper presents the test-bed that will be developed for a Unified Perception & Decision Archi... more This paper presents the test-bed that will be developed for a Unified Perception & Decision Architecture (UPDA). Due to the increasing demand of ADAS systems to be mounted on cars, it is more and more important to develop a unified architecture that can communicate and share information between these systems. This is the aim of an ERC-founded project and to develop and test such architecture a car has been set up with many different sensors. 1 Introduction VisLab is undertaking highly innovative research within its ERC-founded European project, whose topic is the development of an open standard for the perception and decision subsystems of intelligent vehicles. The subject, gathering the attention of car industries all over the world, was first outlined in 2006 by the German Research Foundation under the name of "Cognitive Automobiles" [1]. Currently, many commercial vehicles include sophisticated control devices like ABS, ESP, and others. These control equipments have been independently developed by car manufacturers and suppliers. Generally, they also act independently, and are singularly tuned. Nevertheless, new methods to improve overall performance are currently under development, exploiting communication and cooperation of these devices: the recently introduced Unified Chassis Control (UCC) is an example. The deployment of the UCC in the mass market, requires to adapt and rethink all control subsystems to provide communication, data fusion, and an overall tuning: namely to integrate all of them together. From the car manufacturers and suppliers point of view, the introduction of the UCC requires the redesign of each single block (ABS, ESP, ...) meaning an additional financial effort, besides the obvious delay in reaching the market. Had a complete UCC architecture been defined well in advance with respect to the development of each single block, its implementation would have been straightforward, less costly, and would have reached the market earlier. Perception and decision modules are in an earlier development stage than control ones: the advanced driver assistance systems that are currently available on the market are only basic ones (Lane Departure Warning, Blind Spot Monitoring, Automatic Cruise Control, Collision Mitigation), independently developed by different car manufacturers and suppliers. The state of the art of advanced driver assistance systems, in fact, has not yet defined a complete architecture that would allow fusion of all these basic blocks and benefit from their integration. The availability of such architecture would allow to define a standard module interface so that the following research efforts could be more focused in providing modular systems, already engineered to fit into this architecture.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2011

This paper presents a vision-based method able to increase safety in access automation systems. T... more This paper presents a vision-based method able to increase safety in access automation systems. These systems include automatic swing and sliding gates, bollards and barriers to prevent unwanted access. In current installations the anti-crushing protection is ensured by an electronic device installed on the control boards, which directly controls drive torque, and a couple of infrared photodetectors: when an obstacle is touched by the gate leafs or barriers, or cuts the infrared beam, the control board stops the gate movement. Conversely, the new method proposed in this paper avoids collisions with obstacles and increases the overall detection performance. The new device returns a stop signal when an obstacle is present in a predefined area. The algorithm has been integrated in a real access system to test its performance.

17th ITS World CongressITS JapanITS AmericaERTICO, 2010

This article describes a system for people counting conceived for public transportation vehicles.... more This article describes a system for people counting conceived for public transportation vehicles. The underlying idea is to monitor the number of passengers getting in or out public transportation means like buses and metros over time hence computing reliable estimations in order to improve vehicle's door control. A stereo vision system is presented, it has been developed considering its future installation over bus doors; a feature based people counting algorithm and an object tracking system are used to count people getting in or out of a specific region of interest. The system here described will be installed and tested on an Ivecobus Citelis vehicle in the framework of the Italian Industria 2015 Ecoautobus initiative.

Springer eBooks, 2011

This paper describes a method to detect and extract pedestrians trajectories in proximity of a sl... more This paper describes a method to detect and extract pedestrians trajectories in proximity of a sliding door access in order to automatically open the doors: if a pedestrian walks towards the door, the system opens the door. On the other hand if the pedestrian trajectory is parallel to the door, the system does not open. The sensor is able to self-adjust according to changes in weather conditions and environment. The robustness of this system is provided by a new method for disparity image extraction. The rationale behind this work is that the device developed in this paper avoids unwanted openings in order to decrease needs for maintenance, and increase building efficiency in terms of temperature (i.e. heating and air conditioning). The algorithm has been tested in real conditions to measure its capabilities and estimate its performance.

The reliability of a safety sensor is strongly dependent on the range the sensor is able to cover... more The reliability of a safety sensor is strongly dependent on the range the sensor is able to cover. Safety devices for electric automatic gates, mainly photodetectors, with their reduced sensing capabilities, can not provide the complete avoidance of injuries so that to guarantee protection for people crossing the danger area additional devices must be introduced. In this paper we evaluate as safety sensor a solo vision system fitting sliding and swing gates, the most widespread gate sorts for residential, commercial and industrial automations. Two cameras are placed at the opposite ends of the gate doorway looking at the same area to be monitored. The evaluation is carried out on both virtual and real image sequences in order to verify the practical suitability of the system after the theoretical trials exploitation.

This article presents the VisLab solution for obstacle detection and navigation support for unman... more This article presents the VisLab solution for obstacle detection and navigation support for unmanned vehicles in industrial environments. Although the literature contains many examples to tackle this problem, this solution can be considered innovative as it improves traditional laser-based systems. The proposed system is composed by two subsystems. The first one is an obstacle detection system, which also allows the detection of hanging obstacles, within a 3D monitored area. This solution outperforms the original laser scanner based system used for safety which was limited to bi-dimensional areas only. Another vision system is used for tracking a guideline on the ground, that solves problems of localizations and drifts that sometimes can happen using the laser and vehicle odometry only. After a long testing phase, the system is actually installed in a modern industrial warehouse in Parma in order to finally estimate its robustness and reliability.

This paper presents a system whose aim is to detect and classify road obstacles, like pedestrians... more This paper presents a system whose aim is to detect and classify road obstacles, like pedestrians and vehicles, by fusing data coming from different sensors: a camera, a radar, and an inertial sensor. The camera is mainly used to refine the vehicles' boundaries detected by the radar and to discard those who might be false positives; at the same time, a symmetry based pedestrian detection algorithm is executed, and its results are merged with a set of regions of interest, provided by a Motion Stereo technique. The tests have been performed in several environments and traffic situations, their results showed how the vision based filtering provides an effective reduction of radar's false positives; furthermore, the regions of interest detected by the Motion Stereo algorithm, truly improves the pedestrian detector's performance again by keeping low the number of detection errors. The system has been shown during the APALACI-PReVENT European IP final demonstration 1 in September 2007 in Versailles (France).

Path planning is a key and complex element for every unmanned ground vehicle development. Once th... more Path planning is a key and complex element for every unmanned ground vehicle development. Once the 3D reconstruction of the environment is completed and the objective configuration (desired position and pose) is defined, there has to be a careful path planning algorithm. That path is subject to many restrictions: it has to be time optimal, we have limited degrees of freedom to work with since the vehicle is a non-holonomic robot, we have limited computational power and real-time constraints regarding on-board equipments, and finally the vehicle's mechanical limitations, like the maximum curvature. In this paper we present a new methodology for the path planning calculation. It was meant to be a one for all methodology, useful for different scenarios (automotive, industrial applications, mining, etc.) and different platforms (car-like vehicles, forklift trucks, etc.). This paper splits the problem in two stages. The first one faces the problem of reaching the goal with an a priori knowledge of the position affected by noise. The second approach develops a system capable of reaching the goal, enhancing the precision using a detection system, mainly based on computer vision. Particular focus is given to the interaction between the two methods proposed.

IEEE Intelligent Systems, 2008

capable of real-time data acquisition, synchronization, logging, and-ultimately-data processing a... more capable of real-time data acquisition, synchronization, logging, and-ultimately-data processing and visualization is fundamentally important to improving researcher efficiency. The General Obstacle and Lane Detection framework supports different devices and makes it easy to add new system functionalities. 1 GOLD can easily become the engine for many automotive applications, and it could work in other application domains as well.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2007

This paper surveys the different technologies involved in the development of computer vision appl... more This paper surveys the different technologies involved in the development of computer vision applications for Intelligent Vehicles derived from the 15 year experience of VisLab. Some illustrative examples are also discussed.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2011

Smart Cameras, 2009

This chapter addresses the most important issues involved in the selection, installation, and cal... more This chapter addresses the most important issues involved in the selection, installation, and calibration of a camera system onboard a vehicle, taking into consideration all the specific characteristics of the automotive environment and the requirements of the various applications.

IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium, Proceedings, 2008

This paper presents a system whose aim is to detect and classify road obstacles, like pedestrians... more This paper presents a system whose aim is to detect and classify road obstacles, like pedestrians and vehicles, by fusing data coming from different sensors: a camera, a radar, and an inertial sensor. The camera is mainly used to refine the vehicles' boundaries detected by the radar and to discard those who might be false positives; at the same time, a symmetry based pedestrian detection algorithm is executed, and its results are merged with a set of regions of interest, provided by a Motion Stereo technique. The tests have been performed in several environments and traffic situations, their results showed how the vision based filtering provides an effective reduction of radar's false positives; furthermore, the regions of interest detected by the Motion Stereo algorithm, truly improves the pedestrian detector's performance again by keeping low the number of detection errors. The system has been shown during the APALACI-PReVENT European IP final demonstration 1 in September 2007 in Versailles (France).

This paper presents the test-bed that will be developed for a Unified Perception & Decision Archi... more This paper presents the test-bed that will be developed for a Unified Perception & Decision Architecture (UPDA). Due to the increasing demand of ADAS systems to be mounted on cars, it is more and more important to develop a unified architecture that can communicate and share information between these systems. This is the aim of an ERC-founded project and to develop and test such architecture a car has been set up with many different sensors. 1

— The performance of many computer vision applications, especially in the automotive field, can b... more — The performance of many computer vision applications, especially in the automotive field, can be greatly increased if camera oscillations induced by movements of the acquisition devices are corrected by a stabilization system. An effective stabilizer should cope with different oscillation frequencies and amplitude intervals, and work in a wide range of environments (such as urban, extra-urban or even unstructured ones). In this paper we will analyze three different approaches, based on signature, feature, and correlation tracking respectively, that have been devised to face these problems.

academy spin-off called VisLab, has been involved in basic and applied research developing machin... more academy spin-off called VisLab, has been involved in basic and applied research developing machine vision algorithms and intelligent system for the automotive field for more than one decade. The experience gathered through these years covers a wide range of competencies, either under the algorithmic and

This paper describes a vehicle detection system fusing radar and vision data. Radar data are used... more This paper describes a vehicle detection system fusing radar and vision data. Radar data are used to locate areas of interest on images. Vehicle search in these areas is based on vertical symmetry. All vehicles found in different image areas are mixed together and a series of filters are applied in order to delete false positives. The algorithm analyzes images on a frame by frame basis, without any temporal correlation. Two different statistics, frame-based and event-based, are computed to evaluate the method efficiency. Results and problems are discussed, and some ideas for possible enhancements are provided.

— This paper presents the preliminary results of

Springer eBooks, 2009

This chapter addresses the most important issues involved in the selection, installation, and cal... more This chapter addresses the most important issues involved in the selection, installation, and calibration of a camera system onboard a vehicle, taking into consideration all the specific characteristics of the automotive environment and the requirements of the various applications.

Springer eBooks, 2009

This paper presents the test-bed that will be developed for a Unified Perception & Decision Archi... more This paper presents the test-bed that will be developed for a Unified Perception & Decision Architecture (UPDA). Due to the increasing demand of ADAS systems to be mounted on cars, it is more and more important to develop a unified architecture that can communicate and share information between these systems. This is the aim of an ERC-founded project and to develop and test such architecture a car has been set up with many different sensors. 1 Introduction VisLab is undertaking highly innovative research within its ERC-founded European project, whose topic is the development of an open standard for the perception and decision subsystems of intelligent vehicles. The subject, gathering the attention of car industries all over the world, was first outlined in 2006 by the German Research Foundation under the name of "Cognitive Automobiles" [1]. Currently, many commercial vehicles include sophisticated control devices like ABS, ESP, and others. These control equipments have been independently developed by car manufacturers and suppliers. Generally, they also act independently, and are singularly tuned. Nevertheless, new methods to improve overall performance are currently under development, exploiting communication and cooperation of these devices: the recently introduced Unified Chassis Control (UCC) is an example. The deployment of the UCC in the mass market, requires to adapt and rethink all control subsystems to provide communication, data fusion, and an overall tuning: namely to integrate all of them together. From the car manufacturers and suppliers point of view, the introduction of the UCC requires the redesign of each single block (ABS, ESP, ...) meaning an additional financial effort, besides the obvious delay in reaching the market. Had a complete UCC architecture been defined well in advance with respect to the development of each single block, its implementation would have been straightforward, less costly, and would have reached the market earlier. Perception and decision modules are in an earlier development stage than control ones: the advanced driver assistance systems that are currently available on the market are only basic ones (Lane Departure Warning, Blind Spot Monitoring, Automatic Cruise Control, Collision Mitigation), independently developed by different car manufacturers and suppliers. The state of the art of advanced driver assistance systems, in fact, has not yet defined a complete architecture that would allow fusion of all these basic blocks and benefit from their integration. The availability of such architecture would allow to define a standard module interface so that the following research efforts could be more focused in providing modular systems, already engineered to fit into this architecture.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2011

This paper presents a vision-based method able to increase safety in access automation systems. T... more This paper presents a vision-based method able to increase safety in access automation systems. These systems include automatic swing and sliding gates, bollards and barriers to prevent unwanted access. In current installations the anti-crushing protection is ensured by an electronic device installed on the control boards, which directly controls drive torque, and a couple of infrared photodetectors: when an obstacle is touched by the gate leafs or barriers, or cuts the infrared beam, the control board stops the gate movement. Conversely, the new method proposed in this paper avoids collisions with obstacles and increases the overall detection performance. The new device returns a stop signal when an obstacle is present in a predefined area. The algorithm has been integrated in a real access system to test its performance.

17th ITS World CongressITS JapanITS AmericaERTICO, 2010

This article describes a system for people counting conceived for public transportation vehicles.... more This article describes a system for people counting conceived for public transportation vehicles. The underlying idea is to monitor the number of passengers getting in or out public transportation means like buses and metros over time hence computing reliable estimations in order to improve vehicle's door control. A stereo vision system is presented, it has been developed considering its future installation over bus doors; a feature based people counting algorithm and an object tracking system are used to count people getting in or out of a specific region of interest. The system here described will be installed and tested on an Ivecobus Citelis vehicle in the framework of the Italian Industria 2015 Ecoautobus initiative.

Springer eBooks, 2011

This paper describes a method to detect and extract pedestrians trajectories in proximity of a sl... more This paper describes a method to detect and extract pedestrians trajectories in proximity of a sliding door access in order to automatically open the doors: if a pedestrian walks towards the door, the system opens the door. On the other hand if the pedestrian trajectory is parallel to the door, the system does not open. The sensor is able to self-adjust according to changes in weather conditions and environment. The robustness of this system is provided by a new method for disparity image extraction. The rationale behind this work is that the device developed in this paper avoids unwanted openings in order to decrease needs for maintenance, and increase building efficiency in terms of temperature (i.e. heating and air conditioning). The algorithm has been tested in real conditions to measure its capabilities and estimate its performance.

The reliability of a safety sensor is strongly dependent on the range the sensor is able to cover... more The reliability of a safety sensor is strongly dependent on the range the sensor is able to cover. Safety devices for electric automatic gates, mainly photodetectors, with their reduced sensing capabilities, can not provide the complete avoidance of injuries so that to guarantee protection for people crossing the danger area additional devices must be introduced. In this paper we evaluate as safety sensor a solo vision system fitting sliding and swing gates, the most widespread gate sorts for residential, commercial and industrial automations. Two cameras are placed at the opposite ends of the gate doorway looking at the same area to be monitored. The evaluation is carried out on both virtual and real image sequences in order to verify the practical suitability of the system after the theoretical trials exploitation.

This article presents the VisLab solution for obstacle detection and navigation support for unman... more This article presents the VisLab solution for obstacle detection and navigation support for unmanned vehicles in industrial environments. Although the literature contains many examples to tackle this problem, this solution can be considered innovative as it improves traditional laser-based systems. The proposed system is composed by two subsystems. The first one is an obstacle detection system, which also allows the detection of hanging obstacles, within a 3D monitored area. This solution outperforms the original laser scanner based system used for safety which was limited to bi-dimensional areas only. Another vision system is used for tracking a guideline on the ground, that solves problems of localizations and drifts that sometimes can happen using the laser and vehicle odometry only. After a long testing phase, the system is actually installed in a modern industrial warehouse in Parma in order to finally estimate its robustness and reliability.

This paper presents a system whose aim is to detect and classify road obstacles, like pedestrians... more This paper presents a system whose aim is to detect and classify road obstacles, like pedestrians and vehicles, by fusing data coming from different sensors: a camera, a radar, and an inertial sensor. The camera is mainly used to refine the vehicles' boundaries detected by the radar and to discard those who might be false positives; at the same time, a symmetry based pedestrian detection algorithm is executed, and its results are merged with a set of regions of interest, provided by a Motion Stereo technique. The tests have been performed in several environments and traffic situations, their results showed how the vision based filtering provides an effective reduction of radar's false positives; furthermore, the regions of interest detected by the Motion Stereo algorithm, truly improves the pedestrian detector's performance again by keeping low the number of detection errors. The system has been shown during the APALACI-PReVENT European IP final demonstration 1 in September 2007 in Versailles (France).

Path planning is a key and complex element for every unmanned ground vehicle development. Once th... more Path planning is a key and complex element for every unmanned ground vehicle development. Once the 3D reconstruction of the environment is completed and the objective configuration (desired position and pose) is defined, there has to be a careful path planning algorithm. That path is subject to many restrictions: it has to be time optimal, we have limited degrees of freedom to work with since the vehicle is a non-holonomic robot, we have limited computational power and real-time constraints regarding on-board equipments, and finally the vehicle's mechanical limitations, like the maximum curvature. In this paper we present a new methodology for the path planning calculation. It was meant to be a one for all methodology, useful for different scenarios (automotive, industrial applications, mining, etc.) and different platforms (car-like vehicles, forklift trucks, etc.). This paper splits the problem in two stages. The first one faces the problem of reaching the goal with an a priori knowledge of the position affected by noise. The second approach develops a system capable of reaching the goal, enhancing the precision using a detection system, mainly based on computer vision. Particular focus is given to the interaction between the two methods proposed.

IEEE Intelligent Systems, 2008

capable of real-time data acquisition, synchronization, logging, and-ultimately-data processing a... more capable of real-time data acquisition, synchronization, logging, and-ultimately-data processing and visualization is fundamentally important to improving researcher efficiency. The General Obstacle and Lane Detection framework supports different devices and makes it easy to add new system functionalities. 1 GOLD can easily become the engine for many automotive applications, and it could work in other application domains as well.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2007

This paper surveys the different technologies involved in the development of computer vision appl... more This paper surveys the different technologies involved in the development of computer vision applications for Intelligent Vehicles derived from the 15 year experience of VisLab. Some illustrative examples are also discussed.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2011

Smart Cameras, 2009

This chapter addresses the most important issues involved in the selection, installation, and cal... more This chapter addresses the most important issues involved in the selection, installation, and calibration of a camera system onboard a vehicle, taking into consideration all the specific characteristics of the automotive environment and the requirements of the various applications.

IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium, Proceedings, 2008

This paper presents a system whose aim is to detect and classify road obstacles, like pedestrians... more This paper presents a system whose aim is to detect and classify road obstacles, like pedestrians and vehicles, by fusing data coming from different sensors: a camera, a radar, and an inertial sensor. The camera is mainly used to refine the vehicles' boundaries detected by the radar and to discard those who might be false positives; at the same time, a symmetry based pedestrian detection algorithm is executed, and its results are merged with a set of regions of interest, provided by a Motion Stereo technique. The tests have been performed in several environments and traffic situations, their results showed how the vision based filtering provides an effective reduction of radar's false positives; furthermore, the regions of interest detected by the Motion Stereo algorithm, truly improves the pedestrian detector's performance again by keeping low the number of detection errors. The system has been shown during the APALACI-PReVENT European IP final demonstration 1 in September 2007 in Versailles (France).

This paper presents the test-bed that will be developed for a Unified Perception & Decision Archi... more This paper presents the test-bed that will be developed for a Unified Perception & Decision Architecture (UPDA). Due to the increasing demand of ADAS systems to be mounted on cars, it is more and more important to develop a unified architecture that can communicate and share information between these systems. This is the aim of an ERC-founded project and to develop and test such architecture a car has been set up with many different sensors. 1

— The performance of many computer vision applications, especially in the automotive field, can b... more — The performance of many computer vision applications, especially in the automotive field, can be greatly increased if camera oscillations induced by movements of the acquisition devices are corrected by a stabilization system. An effective stabilizer should cope with different oscillation frequencies and amplitude intervals, and work in a wide range of environments (such as urban, extra-urban or even unstructured ones). In this paper we will analyze three different approaches, based on signature, feature, and correlation tracking respectively, that have been devised to face these problems.

academy spin-off called VisLab, has been involved in basic and applied research developing machin... more academy spin-off called VisLab, has been involved in basic and applied research developing machine vision algorithms and intelligent system for the automotive field for more than one decade. The experience gathered through these years covers a wide range of competencies, either under the algorithmic and

This paper describes a vehicle detection system fusing radar and vision data. Radar data are used... more This paper describes a vehicle detection system fusing radar and vision data. Radar data are used to locate areas of interest on images. Vehicle search in these areas is based on vertical symmetry. All vehicles found in different image areas are mixed together and a series of filters are applied in order to delete false positives. The algorithm analyzes images on a frame by frame basis, without any temporal correlation. Two different statistics, frame-based and event-based, are computed to evaluate the method efficiency. Results and problems are discussed, and some ideas for possible enhancements are provided.

— This paper presents the preliminary results of