Automatic control of camera pan, zoom and focus for improving object recognition

In this paper we consider the use of the GETAFIX robot vision head for object recognition by automatic active panning, zooming and focussing. It is shown that given appropriate areas of interest (which may be defined by motion, change detection or colour segmentation) the sensor can be driven to isolate these regions. Subsequent processing is made more reliable in this process. The effective signal to noise ratio of the data is increased by the process and many features which were unreliably detected by passive techniques can be reliably and accurately acquired by the active approach. Experiments are demonstrated for the case of detecting cylindrical 3D objects in table-top scenes