A comparative evaluation of two methods for visual tracking by saccade control of an active vision head with antropomorphic characteristics conducted at the ITA/INPE Active Computer Vision and Perception Laboratory is presented. The first method accomplishes fixation by detecting motion and controlling gaze direction based on gray-level segmentation. The second method aligns images of different viewpoints in order to apply static camera motion detection. Morphological opening is then employed to compensate for image alignment errors. Results from experiments in a controlled environment show that both approaches are capable of dealing with non-rigid forms and scenes with limited dynamics by operating at about 1 Hz. However, the comparative evaluation shows that image alignment improves tracking robustness to variations in lighting conditions and background texture. The results so far obtained encourage further applications in autonomous robotics and vision-aided robotic rotorcraft navigation.
Monocular fixation; active vision; robotic autonomous navigation; experimental evaluation of active vision algorithms
