Abstract:
Rotational speed is one of the important metrics to be measured for calibrating electric motors in manufacturing, monitoring engines during car repairs, detecting faults ...Show MoreMetadata
Abstract:
Rotational speed is one of the important metrics to be measured for calibrating electric motors in manufacturing, monitoring engines during car repairs, detecting faults in electrical appliance and more. However, existing measurement techniques either require prohibitive hardware (e.g., high-speed camera) or are inconvenient to use in real-world application scenarios. In this article, we propose, EV-Tach, a novel handheld rotational speed estimation system that utilizes emerging imaging sensors known as event cameras or dynamic vision sensors (DVS). The pixels of DVS work independently and trigger an event as soon as a per-pixel intensity change is detected, without global synchronization like conventional RGB cameras. Thus, its unique design features high temporal resolution and generates sparse events, which benefits the high-speed rotation estimation. To achieve accurate and efficient rotational speed estimation, a series of signal processing algorithms are specifically designed for the event streams generated by event cameras on an embedded platform. First, a new cluster-centroids initialization module is proposed to initialize the centroids of the clusters to address the issue that common clustering approaches are easy to fall into a local optimal solution without proper initial centroids. Second, an outlier removal module is designed to suppress the background noise caused by subtle hand movements and host devices vibrations. Third, a coarse-to-fine alignment strategy is proposed with an event stream alignment method to obtain angle of rotation and achieve accurate estimation for rotational speed in a large range. With these bespoke components, EV-Tach is able to extract the rotational speed accurately from the event stream produced by an event camera recording rotary targets. According to our extensive evaluations under controlled and practical experiment settings, the Relative Mean Absolute Error (RMAE) of EV-Tach is as low as 0.3\%_{0}, which is comparabl...
Published in: IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing ( Volume: 23, Issue: 6, June 2024)