The large potential of imaging sensors is increasingly being used to develop efficient mobility solutions designed to meet growing mobility and safety needs. The general trend towards ever smaller and more powerful sensors leads to a wide variety of new applications.
Mobility denotes the condition of being “on the move”. This research area uses the technology of machine vision to support transport and logistics as well as air traffic. Our research group develops robust real-time sensors for 2D and 3D localisation and new sensors for static and dynamic mapping of the environment. Autonomous vehicles must be able to detect and respond to changes in their environment in order to accomplish their task of transporting goods from A to B. In simple cases, obstacle detection devices are assumed to be sufficient to prevent the vehicle from colliding with persons or objects. Transport vehicles in fast changing environments, e.g. in a department store, must be able to analyse the current environment and plan alternative routes if necessary. The limited reaction time and computing power available require the use of alternative and parallel computer architectures (multi-core systems and CUDA for using the processing power of the graphics card).
The Research Studio Austria “Machine Vision meets Mobility“ launched in October 2008 investigates these research topics in cooperation with Graz University of Technology.Air-traffic controllers are faced with the challenge of coping with a flood of information, in particular weather images and data. Digital image processing supports air controllers in this task by automatically deriving information from weather radar and satellite images and by generating new measurement values for improved visibility estimation.