A Survey of Sensor Planning in Computer Vision

Abstract

A survey of research in the area of vision sensor planning is presented. The problem can be summarized as follows: Given information about the environment (e.g., the object under observation, the available sensors) as well as information about the task that the vision system is to accomplish (i.e., detection of certain object features, object recognition, scene reconstruction, object manipulation), develop strategies to automatically determine sensor parameter values that achieve this task with a certain degree of satisfaction. With such strategies, sensor parameters values can be selected and can be purposefully changed in order to effectively perform the task at hand. Sensory systems are then able to operate more flexibly, autonomously, and reliably. This problem has recently become an active area of study with a number of researchers addressing various aspects of the problem. The focus here is on vision sensor planning for the task of robustly detecting object features. For this task, camera and illumination parameters such as position, orientation, and optical settings are determined so that object features are, for example, visible, in focus, within the sensor field of view, magnified as required, and imaged with sufficient contrast. References to, and a brief description of, representative sensing strategies for the tasks of object recognition and scene reconstruction are also presented. For these tasks, sensor configurations are sought that will prove most useful when trying to identify an object or reconstruct a scene. © 1995 IEEE