[Tyler]

The Sky as a Source of Scene Information
     


Outdoor robots equipped with vision sensors can gather a lot of
information from the sky, say CMU researchers in a new CMU Robotics
Institute technical report, What Do
the Sun and the Sky Tell Us About the Camera? (PDF format). The
authors examine only two pieces of information, the position of the Sun
and the sky appearance. By combining this information with a
physically-based model of the sky, they can deduce information about
the camera and lens. This allows their system to work with images from
almost any
convention camera (such as the one above by law_keven).
The researchers collected sky images from online
webcams to use as test data. They also produce a camera-invariant model
of the sky that can be used in future work to understand scene
illumination. This research was done by Jean-François Lalonde, Srinivasa Narasimhan, and Alexei A. Efros.
   

http://robots.net/article/2735.html