A New Anthropomorphic Visual Sensor
Cheon Woo Shin, Seiji Inokuchi · Transactions of the Society of Instrument and Control Engineers · 1995
This paper describes the development of an anthropomorphic visual sensor with retina-like structure to perform the polar mapping.The sensor consists of a dove prism for image rotation and a linear CCD sensor with 512 pixel/line resolution, and holds approximately 45 Kbytes of image data.The retina-like sensor has variable resolution with increasing density towards the center of the visual field, and performs the polar transforming directly.The motion equation that relates the egomotion and/or the motion of the object in the scene to the optical flow is considerably simplified if the velocity is represented in a polar coordinate system, as opposed to a cartesian representation.Development of this sensor holds promise in application to high speed tracking systems, such as the eyes of navigation robots, because it has a data reduction characteristics and mapping function onto the polar plane.