A Scalable Distributed Approach to Mobile Robot Vision

This paper documents our progress during the first year of work on our original proposal entitled 'A Scalable Distributed Approach to Mobile Robot Vision'. We are pursuing a strategy for real-time visual identification and tracking of complex objects which does not rely on specialized image-processing hardware. In this system perceptual schemas represent objects as a graph of primitive features. Distributed software agents identify and track these features, using variable-geometry image subwindows of limited size. Active control of imaging parameters and selective processing makes simultaneous real-time tracking of many primitive features tractable. Perceptual schemas operate independently from the tracking of primitive features, so that real-time tracking of a set of image features is not hurt by latency in recognition of the object that those features make up. The architecture allows semantically significant features to be tracked with limited expenditure of computational resources, and allows the visual computation to be distributed across a network of processors. Early experiments are described which demonstrate the usefulness of this formulation, followed by a brief overview of our more recent progress (after the first year)

A platform for visual learning dc by Charles C. Kemp.

Thesis (M. Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 1998.Includes bibliographical references (p. 77-78).M.Eng

SACCADE AND PURSUIT ON AN ACTIVE HEAD EYE PLATFORM

We describe the implementation of, and results from a realtime active surveillance vision system which detects moving objects in an everyday environment, directs the gaze of a head/eye platform towards the objects and subsequently pursues them smoothly. Target detection and pursuit are performed purely on the basis of image motion, and can continue over extended periods. Two independent parallel processes derive (i) coarse resolution motion over the entire image to direct saccadic shifts in attention over a wide field of view, and (ii) fine resolution motion in a small central region of the image used to perform smooth-pursuit. A gaze controller which selects results from the two visual processes and controls the movement of the head platform is implemented as a finite state machine. © 1994