Direct volume rendering using ray-casting is widely used in practice. By using GPUs and applying acceleration techniques as empty space skipping, high frame rates are possible on modern hardware. This enables performance-critical use-cases such as virtual reality volume rendering. The currently fastest known technique uses volumetric distance maps to skip empty sections of the volume during ray-casting but requires the distance map to be updated per transfer function change. In this paper, we demonstrate a technique for subdividing the volume intensity range into partitions and deriving what we call partitioned distance maps. These can be used to accelerate the distance map computation for a newly changed transfer function by a factor up to 30. This allows the currently fastest known empty space skipping approach to be used while maintaining high frame rates even when the transfer function is changed frequently.

Pure virtual reality headsets lack support for user awareness of real world objects. We show how to augment a virtual environment with real world objects by incorporating color and stereo information from the front-mounted stereo camera system of the HTC Vive Pro. With an adjustable amount of virtual and real elements by specifying the depth range of interest for real objects these can be either always augmented on top of the virtual reality or embedded in the virtual world with correct occlusion. Possible use cases are training with appliances that require you to see both the appliance as well as your hands, collaborating in virtual reality with the real users instead of avatars, as well as static and moving obstacle detection. Objects of interest are cut out depending on depth values of the stereo matching system's depth image. The depth image matches only one of both camera sensors so a second depth image is derived to match the other camera sensor as well. We overlay the rendered virtual reality images for both eyes with the corresponding cut-out camera images. Furthermore we address the problem of missing depth data especially for very near objects with an integral image based depth-dependent foreground mask expansion algorithm. Since a comfortable mixed reality experience requires high framerates of optimally 90 frames per second we utilize the GPU for optimized implementations of the algorithms and computations involved.

This paper presents1a multisensor surveillance system used inside an Automated Border Control (ABC) system (more specifically, an eGate). The system consists of two parts: counting the number of persons inside the eGate (person separation), ensuring that no more than one passenger is present; left luggage detection, ensuring that the passenger did not leave any item inside the eGate. These tasks are performed using a top-view mounted sensor inside the eGate, consisting of a trinocular camera configuration comprised of a monochrome stereo setup which delivers depth information, and a color camera mounted in-between, capturing color information. In contrast to already existing ABC solutions, which mostly use electronic sensors, e.g. simple beam technology, for person separation and left item detection, we introduce vision based technologies to elevate the security of such systems to a higher level, also increasing the usability for the border guard. The system achieves real time and had been demonstrated and evaluated at the Vienna International Airport.

Summary form only given. Anthropomatics addresses the symbiosis between humans and machines, focusing on a deeper understanding of the cooperation, interaction and coexistence between humans and machines stimulating and strengthen advanced and deep research in response to the challenges of increasingly smart environments and multimodal access to various complex technical systems. At KIT the Focus Anthropomatics and Robotics - APR has been set up by a number of research groups focusing on the research field of Anthropomatics and Robotics with more than 250 researchers. Modelling humans and their capabilities requires a deep understanding of the principle of biomechanics and kinematics, as well as the underlaying neural control principles and the perceptive and actuatoric system. Modelling and understanding of the sensomotoric mechanisms, learning and developement of skills and cognititve capabilities to enable humans to interact with the world is of high importance to design technical systems operating closely and interactively with humans via various modalities like speech, haptics, vision, grasping and locomotion. Typical research fields are related to active vision, interpretation of scenes and human activities, recognition and tracking technologies multimodal & perceptual user interfaces, understanding and translation of speech. Complementary research needed is related to the retrieval & access and summarization of multimedia data sources, translation of spoken text, context aware learning computers, implicit services and many more. The robotics application field ranges from interactive industrial robotics, service robotic companions, humanoids and medical robotics. In all domains the integrating aspects are focusing on algorithms processing real word data as well as open self-organizing architectures which allow autonomy, skill an