Active Vision System Inspired by Biological Fixation Mechanism.

Focusing on the biological fixation mechanism, we propose a fixation technique, and implement it into an active vision system. In our technique, large and small camera movements are coordinated to detect an object precisely at the optical axis of the camera. Each type of movement is performed via two separate fixation methods : approximate fixation and adjustment fixation. In the former fixation, a preliminary fixation point is detected using the multi-resolution retina. After the optical axis of the camera is aligned in the direction of this point, the latter fixation method determines the precise fixation point by means of visual feedback control, which minimized the angle between the object's center and the optical axis of the camera. Experimental results show that the active vision system using our proposed technique succeded in fixating objects one after another in a scene, even if several objects are placed within it. According to these results, we have confirmed that bottom-up processing using primitive visual features is an effective technique for precise fixation.