The Role of Active Vision in Exploring Growth, Transport, and Exchange Processes

The active vision paradigm plays a significant role in a recently established interdisciplinary research initiative (DFG Forschergruppe) at Heidelberg University. The goal of the Forschergruppe is to develop and apply advanced image sequence processing techniques to study key scientific questions in environmental sciences and biology that cannot be approached with conventional techniques. The Forschergruppe includes researchers from the Interdisciplinary Center for Scientific Computing, the Botany Institute, and the Institute for Environmental Physics. This paper surveys the research strategy of the Forschergruppe with respect to the active vision paradigm and discusses active imaging techniques, camera control and calibration, tracking, motion analysis, 3-D reconstruction, and multichannel image fusion.