Robot Motion Vision Pait I: Theory

A direct method called fixation is introduced for solving the general motion vision problem, arbitrary motion relative to an arbitrary environment. This method results in a linear constraint equation which explicitly expresses the rotational velocity in terms of the translational velocity. The combination of this constraint equation with the Brightness-Change Constraint Equation solves the general motion vision problem. Avoiding correspondence and optical flow has been the motivation behind this direct method which uses the image brightness information such as temporal and spatial brightness gradients directly. In contrast to previous direct methods, the fixation method does not put any severe restrictions on the motion or the environment. Moreover, the fixation method neither requires tracked images as its input nor uses tracking for obtaining fixated images. Instead, it introduces a pixel shifting process to construct fixated images for any arbitrary fixation point. This is done entirely in software without any use of camera motion for tracking.