An overview of space-variant and active vision mechanisms for resource-constrained human inspired robotic vision

Abstract

In order to explore and understand the surrounding environment in an efficient manner, humans have developed a set of space-variant vision mechanisms that allow them to actively attend different locations in the surrounding environment and compensate for memory, neuronal transmission bandwidth and computational limitations in the brain. Similarly, humanoid robots deployed in everyday environments have limited on-board resources, and are faced with increasingly complex tasks that require interaction with objects arranged in many possible spatial configurations. The main goal of this work is to describe and overview biologically inspired, space-variant human visual mechanism benefits, when combined with state-of-the-art algorithms for different visual tasks (e.g. object detection), ranging from low-level hardwired attention vision (i.e. foveal vision) to high-level visual attention mechanisms. We overview the state-of-the-art in biologically plausible space-variant resource-constrained vision architectures, namely for active recognition and localization tasks.