Egomotion perception using visual tracking

Abstract

The ability of a biological organism to visually track a perceptually significant feature in its environment has been argued to be an important feedback mechanism guiding locomotion. This paper analyzes the constraints available from the visual motion stimuli in the context of tracking. Our aim is to show that the act of tracking simplifies the decoding of egomotion parameters from motion stimuli. The constraints obtainable under tracking are utilized to analyze a possible egomotion decoding strategy for a binocular robot eye system, modeled after the human ocular tracking (smooth pursuit) mechanism. The main result of the paper is in the derivation of a closed‐form solution of the egomotion parameters using feedback information concerning the movement of the tracking motors over time. The theoretical results are verified by experiments. We believe that the active tracking approach presented here is a more simple, practical, and manageable technique in a robot navigation setting, compared to passive methods.