This paper demonstrates the capabilities of three-dimensional (3D) LiDAR scanners in supporting a safe distance maintenance functionality in human–robot collaborative applications. The use of such sensors is severely under-utilised in collaborative work with heavy-duty robots. However, even with a relatively modest proprietary 3D sensor prototype, a respectable level of safety has been achieved, which should encourage the development of such applications in the future. Its associated intelligent control system (ICS) is presented, as well as the sensor’s technical characteristics. It acquires the positions of the robot and the human periodically, predicts their positions in the near future optionally, and adjusts the robot’s speed to keep its distance from the human above the protective separation distance. The main novelty is the possibility to load an instance of the robot programme into the ICS, which then precomputes the future position and pose of the robot. Higher accuracy and safety are provided, in comparison to traditional predictions from known real-time and near-past positions and poses. The use of a 3D LiDAR scanner in a speed and separation monitoring application and, particularly, its specific placing, are also innovative and advantageous. The system was validated by analysing videos taken by the reference validation camera visually, which confirmed its safe operation in reasonably limited ranges of robot and human speeds.

A new algorithm is presented for detecting the global reflection symmetry of geometric objects. The algorithm works for 2D and 3D objects which may be open or closed and may or may not contain holes. The algorithm accepts a point cloud obtained by sampling the object’s surface at the input. The points are inserted into a uniform grid and so-called boundary cells are identified. The centroid of the boundary cells is determined, and a testing symmetry axis/plane is set through it. In this way, the boundary cells are split into two parts and they are faced with the symmetry estimation function. If the function estimates the symmetric case, the boundary cells are further split until a given threshold is reached or a non-symmetric result is obtained. The new testing axis/plane is then derived and tested by rotation around the centroid. This paper introduces three techniques to accelerate the computation. Competitive results were obtained when the algorithm was compared against the state of the art.

In the paper, we present a method for space-efficient representation of geometric tree models, which are provided as skeletons with radii attached to individual branch segments. The proposed approach uses a new differential 3D chain code to encode orientation changes of consecutive branch segments, which allows optimizing chain code generation for increased compressibility while maintaining control over the model reconstruction error. The presented method is the first to encode the complete branching geometry including the branch radii and provides level-of-detail construction directly from the chain code. It is demonstrated that by using interpolative encoding of the resulting tree descriptors and radii sequences, the storage requirements for geometric description of a mixed all-aged forest can be reduced to less than 15 percent of its raw size while preserving the structural fidelity of tree models.

A new approach is proposed for lossless raster image compression employing interpolative coding. A new multifunction prediction scheme is presented first. Then, interpolative coding, which has not been applied frequently for image compression, is explained briefly. Its simplification is introduced in regard to the original approach. It is determined that the JPEG LS predictor reduces the information entropy slightly better than the multi-functional approach. Furthermore, the interpolative coding was moderately more efficient than the most frequently used arithmetic coding. Finally, our compression pipeline is compared against JPEG LS, JPEG 2000 in the lossless mode, and PNG using 24 standard grayscale benchmark images. JPEG LS turned out to be the most efficient, followed by JPEG 2000, while our approach using simplified interpolative coding was moderately better than PNG. The implementation of the proposed encoder is extremely simple and can be performed in less than 60 lines of programming code for the coder and 60 lines for the decoder, which is demonstrated in the given pseudocodes.

The characterisation of geometric shapes produces their concise description and is, therefore, important for subsequent analyses, for example in Computer Vision, Machine Learning, or shape matching. A new method for extracting characterisation vectors of 2D geometric shapes is proposed in this paper. The shape of interest, embedded into a raster space, is swept several times by sweep-lines having different slopes. The interior shape’s points, being in the middle of its boundary and laying on the actual sweep-line, are identified at each stage of the sweeping process. The midpoints are then connected iteratively into chains. The chains are filtered, vectorised, and normalised. The obtained polylines from the vectorisation step are used to design the shape’s characterisation vector for further application-specific analyses. The proposed method was verified on numerous shapes, where single- and multi-threaded implementations were compared. Finally, characterisation vectors, among which some were rotated and scaled, were determined for these shapes. The proposed method demonstrated a good rotation- and scaling-invariant identification of equal shapes.

A new compact encoding is presented of rasterized bi-level shapes at multiple resolutions. The encoder accepts the Freeman chain code in four directions (F4) at the input, and builds a multi-resolution code named MrCC. The encoding process constructs the coarser representation of F4 chain code, and the resulting MrCC codes simultaneously. MrCC encodes the differences between sequences of F4 chain code from successive resolutions. Several transformations are performed during this process. Various rasterized shapes were used to analyse the efficiency of the new code, which was, on average, 22% better than the concatenation of F4 chain codes of various resolutions.