Towards Active Exploration of Static and Dynamic Scene Geometry

In this paper we describe the use of a steerable camera and active vision system in the real-time recovery of trajectories of objects moving on a planar surface in the scene. The system first selfcalibrates the transformation from camera platform joint angles to scene plane coordinates by active observation of static scene geometry which has been stored as a model. The transformation is encoded as a homography. When distracted by motion, the camera saccades to the object and subsequently tracks it, and the 2D Cartesian components of the motion trajectory are recovered within the scene plane.