Gradient-based Camera Exposure Control for Outdoor Mobile Platforms
This addresses exposure control for image processing on outdoor mobile platforms, offering a practical solution for robotics and computer vision applications.
The paper tackles the problem of automatic camera exposure control for mobile robots by using gradient quantity to set exposure levels, and extends this to multi-camera systems for brightness consistency and proper exposure. It demonstrates effectiveness in applications like pedestrian detection and visual odometry.
We introduce a novel method to automatically adjust camera exposure for image processing and computer vision applications on mobile robot platforms. Because most image processing algorithms rely heavily on low-level image features that are based mainly on local gradient information, we consider that gradient quantity can determine the proper exposure level, allowing a camera to capture the important image features in a manner robust to illumination conditions. We then extend this concept to a multi-camera system and present a new control algorithm to achieve both brightness consistency between adjacent cameras and a proper exposure level for each camera. We implement our prototype system with off-the-shelf machine-vision cameras and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms on practical applications, including pedestrian detection, visual odometry, surround-view imaging, panoramic imaging and stereo matching.