Introduction Inventions such as miniature unmanned aerial vehicles would extend our capabilities in a variety of areas and are a major focus of active research. Before their promise can be reached, however, significant challenges in guidance and control, flight mechanisms, and energy storage must be overcome. Engineers and scientists are turning to animals, particularly insects, for inspiration...

Whether colour patterns that have no luminance variation can evoke the perception of visual motion has long been a controversial issue. Recent studies using new and old techniques have now provided compelling evidence that colour can indeed contribute to motion perception.

This thesis addresses computer vision techniques estimating geometric properties of the 3-D world from digital images. Such properties are essential for object recognition and classi cation, mobile robots navigation, reverse engineering and synthesis of virtual environments. In particular, this thesis describes the modules involved in the computation of the structure of a scene given some image...

Note: the phenomena described in this chapter are very difficult to understand without viewing the moving stimuli. The reader is urged to view the demos when reading the chapter, at: 2 Like many aspects of vision, motion perception begins with a massive array of local measurements performed by neurons in area V1. Each receptive field covers a small piece of the visual world, and as a result suf...

Markerless vision-based human motion analysis has the potential to provide an inexpensive, non-obtrusive solution for the estimation of body poses. The significant research effort in this domain has been motivated by the fact that many application areas, including surveillance, Human–Computer Interaction and automatic annotation, will benefit from a robust solution. In this paper, we discuss th...

How does the brain compare visual inputs over space and time to extract motion? Electron microscopic (EM) and molecular analyses reveal a new circuit architecture for motion processing in Drosophila. An offset in the weighting of synaptic connections and differential use of fast and slow nicotinic receptors suggests a mechanism that can implement spatiotemporal comparisons.

Sensory neurons process and convey information about our surroundings, providing the physiological basis for how we interact with the external world. In order to understand neuronal responses we must identify the rules governing how sensory information is encoded. It was proposed more than fifty years ago that neural codes constitute efficient representations of the natural world (Attneave, 195...

The projection of 3D scenarios onto 2D surfaces produces distortion on the resulting images that affects the accuracy of low-level motion primitives. Independently of the motion detection algorithm used, post-processing stages that use motion data are dominated by this distortion artefact. Therefore we need to devise a way of reducing the distortion effect in order to improve the post-processin...

We present an overview of our recent methodology for modeling humans that is based on the use of computer vision methods to analyze human motion and extract invariants of the motion in a parameterized way that captures the nature of this motion. This basic parameterized motion can then be altered based on additional user input in the form of parameters to create a wide variety of human motions....

Whereas early visual processing has been considered primarily retinotopic, recent studies have revealed significant contributions of nonretinotopic processing to the human perception of fundamental visual features. For adult vision, it has been shown that information about color, shape, and size is nonretinotipically integrated along the motion trajectory, which could bring about clear and unbl...