RESEARCHES

Smart Vision & Robotic Sensing

Professor, Robotics Laboratory
Smart Innovation Program, Graduate School of Advanced Science and Engineering
Hiroshima University
Idaku ISHII
>> Research Contents
In order to establish high-speed robot senses that are much faster than human senses, we are conducting research and development of information systems and devices that can achieve real-time image processing at 1000 frames/s or greater. As well as integrated algorithms to accelerate sensor information processing, we are also studying new sensing methodologies based on vibration and flow dynamics; they are too fast for humans to sense.

Real-Time LOC-based Morphological Cell Analysis System Using High-Speed Vision

In this paper, a high-speed vision-based morphological analysis system for fast-flowing cells in a microchannel implementing a multi-object feature extraction algorithm on a high-speed vision platform is proposed.

Real-time video processing is performed in hardware logic by extracting the moment features and bounding boxes of multiple cells in 512×256-pixel images at 2000 fps. The extracted cell regions are pushed into a first-in-first-out (FIFO) buffer for realtime image-based morphological analysis after being shrunk proportionally to a certain size. By extracting the bounding boxes of the cell regions using hardware logic and shrinking the cell region to a certain size to reduce processing time, our high-speed vision system can perform fast morphological analysis of cells at 2 ms/cell in fast microchannel flows.

The results of real-time experiments conducted to analyze the size, eccentricity, and transparency of fertilized sea urchin eggs fast flowing in microchannels verify the efficacy of our vision-based cell analysis system.

Concept of our system
Fig. 1: Concept of our system.


Processing flow
Fig. 2: Flow chart of the implemented algorithms.


3D development path of sea urchin embryo from 1 to 60 h after fertilization
Fig. 3: 3D development path of sea urchin embryo from 1 to 60 h after fertilization.


Demo video for LOC-based morphological cell analysis system
WMV movie (13.5M)
Demo video for LOC-based morphological cell analysis system