Vision System with High Performance Wide Angle Fovea Lens

This paper designs and produces a single camera head, i.e., the camera view direction control device, for the highperformance Wide Angle Fovea (WAF) sensor. Since the input image by the WAF sensor has an explicit attention region inside its wide-angle field of view (FOV), the view direction control of the WAF sensor is strongly required to acquire visual data most efficiently from the environments. Further, this paper proposes an algorithm to detect self-motion of the WAF sensor using the optical flow calculated from two temporally-sequential images. We have implemented and experimented this algorithm. The experimental results have proved the proposed algorithm performs well to detect self-motion using only the peripheral FOV. This vision system enables to distinguish the self-motion from detecting moving objects in the still scene. The authors hope this WAF vision system will play a role of eyes and will help to control robots more intelligently in the very near future.