Autonomous vehicles and robots require increasingly more robustness and reliability to meet the demands of modern tasks. These requirements specially apply to cameras onboard such vehicles because they are the predominant sensors to acquire information about the environment and support actions. Cameras must maintain proper functionality and take automatic countermeasures if necessary. Existing solutions are typically tailored to specific problems or detached from the downstream computer vision tasks of the machines, which, however, determine the requirements on the quality of the produced camera images. We propose a generic and task-oriented self-health-maintenance framework for cameras based on data- and physically-grounded models. To this end, we determine two reliable, real-time capable estimators for typical image effects of a camera in poor condition (blur, noise phenomena and most common combinations) by evaluating traditional and customized machine learning-based approaches in extensive experiments. Furthermore, we implement the framework on a real-world ground vehicle and demonstrate how a camera can adjust its parameters to counter an identified poor condition to achieve optimal application capability based on experimental (non-linear and non-monotonic) input-output performance curves. Object detection is chosen as target application, and the image effects motion blur and sensor noise as conditioning examples. Our framework not only provides a practical ready-to-use solution to monitor and maintain the health of cameras, but can also serve as a basis for extensions to tackle more sophisticated problems that combine additional data sources (e.g., sensor or environment parameters) empirically in order to attain fully reliable and robust machines.


    Access

    Check access

    Check availability in my library

    Order at Subito €


    Export, share and cite



    Title :

    Monitoring and Adapting the Physical State of a Camera for Autonomous Vehicles


    Contributors:


    Publication date :

    2024-05-01


    Size :

    4802454 byte




    Type of media :

    Article (Journal)


    Type of material :

    Electronic Resource


    Language :

    English



    Camera system for autonomous vehicles

    KIM SUNG HWAN | European Patent Office | 2024

    Free access

    CAMERA APPARATUS FOR AUTONOMOUS VEHICLES

    YIM JIN HYUK / JUNG JAE WON / LEE HYUN JAE et al. | European Patent Office | 2024

    Free access

    Camera ring structure for autonomous vehicles

    TOTH KIMBERLY GENEVA / HERMALYN BRENDAN / MCGUIRE SHANE et al. | European Patent Office | 2021

    Free access

    Camera assessment techniques for autonomous vehicles

    CRADDOCK CARL WARREN / WENDEL ANDREAS | European Patent Office | 2023

    Free access

    CAMERA RING STRUCTURE FOR AUTONOMOUS VEHICLES

    TOTH KIMBERLY GENEVA / HERMALYN BRENDAN / MCGUIRE SHANE et al. | European Patent Office | 2022

    Free access