| Abstract: | For a long time it was known that motion control of both head and eyes is a strategic aspect of human visual perception. Despite the continuous shifts and often sudden changes of the gaze direction, this capability guarantees stable and effective 3D perception, even in case of ambiguities and relative motion between the observer and the external objects. The article considers a robotic vision system, with an anthropomorphic kinematic structure, and proposes a formal characterization of the perceptual advantages related to the active control of the cameras. It is shown that movement of the cameras, besides providing computational and behavioral advantages, is essential to gather optimal measurements. In particular, the control objective of the eye‐head system is related to a quality measure function describing the sensitivity of the transformation from world to camera coordinates. The theoretical results presented are accompanied by simulations and experimental data, coming from a real setup, which give clear evidence of some relevant aspects of the biological vision‐like fixation, vergence, and eye‐head compensation. ©1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. |
