Active Monocular Fixation using the Log-polar Sensor

This paper presents a fast corner fixation algorithm for log-polar cameras. The algorithm uses the log-Hough transform to fixate on the dominant corner in the image by aligning the optical axis with the corner. The algorithm has been implemented in a real-time closed-loop control system, which exhibits stable behaviour as the tracking error minimises towards the image centre. This system demonstrates an important benefit of utilising the logpolar sensor with log-Hough line detection that there is an automatic bias to corners closer to fovea. This removes the need for searching explicitly through all detected corner positions in order to locate the one closest to an arbitrary point. In addition, since the log-polar sensor has a large field of view for a given number of pixels compared to Cartesian space-invariant cameras, it removes the need to use a tracking window to increase performance, while still supporting high resolution at the fovea.