Design of an image acquisition setup for mimic tracking

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Tezin Türü: Yüksek Lisans

Tezin Yürütüldüğü Kurum: Orta Doğu Teknik Üniversitesi, Mühendislik Fakültesi, Makina Mühendisliği Bölümü, Türkiye

Tezin Onay Tarihi: 2007

Öğrenci: ÖZGÜLER MİNE AKÖNER

Danışman: AHMET BUĞRA KOKU

Özet:

With the advances in computer technology and the changing needs of people’s daily lives, robots start to offer alternative solutions. As one of these solutions, the branch of humanoid robots emerged as advanced robots that can interact with people. Robot faces are one of the most effective means of interacting with people; since they can express their emotions and reactions through facial mimics. However, the development of realistic robot faces necessitates the knowledge of the trajectories and displacements of actual face mimics. In this study, a setup (both hardware and software), that can be used for tracking critical points on human face while exhibiting mimics, is developed. From the outputs of this setup, the mimic trajectories are going to be extracted. The setup is designed and manufactured to be durable to external effects so that with a single camera calibration procedure the 3D reconstruction can be carried out several times. The setup consists of two webcams that are specially oriented for mimic tracking. The images taken from the cameras are corrected; their features are extracted using image processing algorithms; the centroids of the features are found; correspondence is carried out and the reconstruction is made. This system can also be used for any special point tracking or volumetric measurement purposes.