In the routine inspection of industrial or other areas , teams of robots with various sensors could operate together to great eeect, but require reliable, accurate and exible localisation capabilities to be able to move around safely. We demonstrate accurate localisation for an inspection team consisting of a robot with stereo active vision and its companion with an active lighting system, and ...

Robot hand-eye coordination has recently enjoyed much attention. Previous research at MIT has examined combining vision and manipulation applied to the task of tracking and catching tossed balls in controlled environments. Building upon the foundations of this past research, this paper presents work which incorporates a new active vision system which requires a minimally controlled environment,...

In this paper, we present a novel design and implementation of a foveated wide angle lens. It is strongly motivated towards applications for active vision in complex and dynamic environments. The projection curve is designed so that it facilitates active vision algorithms for motion analysis, object identi cation, and precise xation. The implementation achieves small size and light weight so th...

The purpose of this paper is twofold: we first present a novel architecture for real-time active vision systems, and then enhance the architecture with a un$ed approach to fault tolerance. Our system is designed modularly in order to enable the flexible addition of hardware and sojiware redundancy and also to allow reconfiguration when and where needed. This gives us the ability to handle fault...

There have been a number of interesting and exciting developments in computer vision research over the past decade. In this paper we briefly review some of those in which the contribution of British research groups has been prominent. Examples include model based vision, the application of invariance theory, active vision, and the application of statistical techniques to the modelling and inter...

We present an efficient method within an active vision framework for recognizing objects which are ambiguous from certain viewpoints. The system is allowed to reposition the camera to capture additional views and, therefore, to resolve the classification result obtained from a single view. The approach uses an appearance based object representation, namely the parametric eigenspace, and augment...

In this paper we present a novel approach for video shot segmentation based on active vision techniques. A continuity function is introduced taking into account the results from biological vision and experiments and discussions are carried out.

Active vision may be useful to perform landmark-based navigation where landmark relationship requires active scanning of the environment. In this article we explore this hypothesis by evolving the neural system controlling vision and behavior of a mobile robot equipped with a pan/tilt camera so that it can discriminate visual patterns and arrive at the goal zone. The experimental setup employed...