Real-time monocular fixation control using the log-polar transformation and a confidence-based similarity measure

A new technique for the fixation task is proposed. The proposed technique is view-based and uses a gradient descent technique in order to maximize an intensity-based similarity measure between the reference image and the currently grabbed image during control time. A key constraint for the development of computational mechanisms is the achievement of real-time capability on low-cost hardware. We utilize the complex-logarithmic mapping of input images into log-polar space. In addition to a high compression rate this also supports better fixation performance using a space-variant image representation of the image. We further suggest a confidence based similarity measure to overcome the problem of distortions and partial occlusions during the movement of the camera which is the main problem of view-based approaches. We demonstrate the practicability of our method in a real world experiment which solves the fixation task at a frame rate of 16 Hz on an Intel P200 architecture without any special image processing hardware