Active vision systems control the camera gaze direction based on visual feedback, which facilitates the data processing for interpreting the surrounding environonment. It has been demonstrated that there are many computational advantages of incorporating active control of gaze into perceptual processing. In fact, biological visual systems appear to exploit this possibility by controlling their eye position. For humans, their oculormotor control system consists of six muscles arranged in an opponent fashion to control the rotation of the eye around the horizontal, vertical and optical axes. In this thesis, we describe the design and performance characterization of a biomimetic active stereo vision system. Our key design objectives were to provide torsional control for each eye and to ens...[ Read more ]

Active vision systems control the camera gaze direction based on visual feedback, which facilitates the data processing for interpreting the surrounding environonment. It has been demonstrated that there are many computational advantages of incorporating active control of gaze into perceptual processing. In fact, biological visual systems appear to exploit this possibility by controlling their eye position. For humans, their oculormotor control system consists of six muscles arranged in an opponent fashion to control the rotation of the eye around the horizontal, vertical and optical axes. In this thesis, we describe the design and performance characterization of a biomimetic active stereo vision system. Our key design objectives were to provide torsional control for each eye and to ensure that the vision system can execute saccade-like movement at the same time scales observed in humans. In total, there are six degrees of rotational freedom: horizontal, vertical and torsional rotation for the two eyes. We achieved the high speed of human saccades using relatively low cost motors by minimizing the rotational inertia associated with the fastest axes, and allocating the largest rotational inertia to the slowest axis. In our system, torsional rotation is performed first, followed by horizontal and vertical rotation, which is different from the more traditional and conventional Fick and Helmholtz models. Besides working on the speed of the system, we calibrated the binocular system by matching proposed mathematical models describing the mechanical structures with experimental data from images. Using this system, we verified the benefit of perceptual processing obtained by the addition of torsional control.