Humanoid Vision Resembles Primate Archetype

Perception in the visual cortex and dorsal stream of the primate brain includes important visual competencies, such as: a consistent representation of visual space despite eye movement; egocentric spatial perception; attentional gaze deployment; and, coordinated stereo fixation upon dynamic objects. These competencies have emerged commensurate with observation of the real world, and constitute a vision system that is optimised, in some sense, for perception and interaction. We present a robotic vision system that incorporates these competencies. We hypothesise that similarities between the underlying robotic system model and that of the primate vision system will elicit accordingly similar gaze behaviours. Psychophysical trials were conducted to record human gaze behaviour when free-viewing a reproducible, dynamic, 3D scene. Identical trials were conducted with the robotic system. A statistical comparison of robotic and human gaze behaviour has shown that the two are remarkably similar. Enabling a humanoid to mimic the optimised gaze strategies of humans may be a significant step towards facilitating human-like perception.