Design and control of active vision based mechanisms for intelligent robots

In this paper, we propose a design of an active vision system for intelligent robot application purposes. The system has the degrees of freedom of pan, tilt, vergence, camera height adjustment and baseline adjustment with a hierarchical control system structure. Based on this vision system, we discuss two problems involved in the binocular gaze stabilization process. They are fixation point selection, vergence disparity extraction A hierarchical approach to determining point of fixation from potential gaze targets using evaluation function representing human visual behavior to outside stimuli is suggested. We also characterize different visual tasks in two cameras for vergence control purposes and phase-based method based on binarized images to extract vergence disparity for vergence control is presented. Control algorithm for vergence control is discussed.