Gaze control on virtual active vision system with binocular fish-eye lenses

A human continuously directs his eyes toward interesting points to recognize an object. Such eye movement or visual attention plays an important role in human vision. To simulate such eye movements, the paper proposes a virtual active vision head with binocular fish-eye lenses. Moving objects are detected within the wide angle of view obtained through the fish-eye lens by comparing the input image with the background image estimated by an adaptive M-estimator. The location of the moving object is used as a visual cue to achieve the saccadic eye movement. The proposed virtual active vision system was implemented on a PC cluster. Two PCs are used to capture images through the left and right fish-eye lenses and a PC with four processors is used for image processing. Real time gaze control is achieved on the proposed virtual binocular active vision system.