FOVEA: a foveated vergent active stereo vision system for dynamic three-dimensional scene recovery

We introduce FOVEA: a foveated vergent active stereo vision system. FOVEA actively directs a pair of vergent stereo cameras to fixate on surfaces in a scene, performing multiresolution surface depth recovery at each fixation point, and accumulating and integrating a multiresolution map of surface depth over multiple successive fixations. Several features of the system are novel: an active foveated image sampling and processing strategy is shown to greatly simplify the problem of establishing correspondence; a probabilistic fixation strategy is developed that is driven by the scene structure; the system uses the fixation strategy to recover local depth maps at a high resolution at multiple fixation points, eventually mapping the entire scene; and finally, the local maps are integrated as they are acquired into a global depth map.