Computer Modeling and Simulation of an Active Vision Camera System

Verification of computer vision theories is facilitated by the development and implementation of computer simulation systems. Computer simulation avoids the necessity of building actual systems; they are fast, flexible, and can be easily duplicated for use by others. We proposed, in our previous work, an useful computational model to explore the image sensing process. This model decouples the photometric information and the geometric information of objects in the scene. In this report, we extend the proposed image sensing model to simulate the formation of moving objects and stereo imaging applications. The simulation algorithms for curved objects, motion simulation, and stereo imaging are presented. Based on the proposed model and algorithms, a computer simulation system called Active Vision Simulator (AVS) have been implemented. The implementations are efficient, modular, extensible, and user-friendly so that others can easily reproduce and/or verify their experiments on a broader set of computer vision theories.