Three-Stage Visual Perception for Vertebrate-type Dynamic Machine Vision

Abstract

Abstract: Efficient real-time visual perception in civilized natural environments (e.g. road networks) has to take advantage of foveal – peripheral differentiation for data economy and of active gaze control for a number of benefits. 1. Inertial gaze stabilization considerably alleviates the evaluation of image sequences taken by cameras with stronger tele-lenses; it allows a reduction in angular disturbances from rough ground by at least an order of magnitude with simple negative angular rate data feedback. 2. Visual tracking of fast moving objects reduces motion blur for these objects. – 3. In the near range, a large field of view is mandatory, however, only coarse angular resolution is sufficient; with a field of view (f.o.v.)> ~ 100°, both the region in front of and to the side of the vehicle may be viewed simultaneously. For own behavior decision, motion behaviors of objects both in the wide f.o.v. nearby and in several regions of special interest further away have to be understood in conjunction. In order to achieve this efficiently, three distinct visual processes with specific knowledge bases have to be employed in a consecutive way. In the wide f.o.v., bottom-up feature extraction has to answer the question: ‘Is there anything of special interest? ’ The corresponding feature extraction operators are domain-specific. On initialization, they have to give indications of objects of interest all over the image. Stable feature aggregations over several cycles have to trigger object hypotheses for the second stage; these regions may then be discarded for stage 1. Stage 2 works on single objects, however, on multiple of these in parallel. When looking almost parallel t