Active/dynamic stereo: a general framework

A general framework for dynamic stereo is proposed. It is shown that a binocular system, able to actively control the gaze of the cameras, can profitably exploit stereo and motion analysis to compute the relative orientation and time-to-impact with respect to the environment. The cooperative schema, in which motion and stereo vision are combined to take under control the temporal evolution of disparity, is particularly suitable for robot navigation or for tasks involving a robotic head mounted on a mobile platform. The framework takes into account tilt and pan motion of the cameras, and generic translation of the binocular system. An experiment performed on a stereo image sequence from a prototype robotic head is presented