Active fixation using attentional shifts, affine resampling, and multiresolution search

Presents a new approach for fixing two cameras at a single location in a 3D scene. Fixation requires the detection of binocular disparity for a single point of interest in the scene so that vergence control can reduce that disparity to zero. Most existing systems use area-based matching, since feature-based matching is computationally prohibitive. Unfortunately, the area-based approach does not perform well when confronted with steeply inclined surfaces, occlusions, repeating patterns or featureless image regions. The method presented in this paper utilizes attentional shifts and affine resampling to combat these problems. These are integrated with adaptive window-size control and coarse-to-fine correlation-based searching. The effectiveness of the approach for complex scenes is demonstrated with several stereo image pairs