An Active Vision System for Obtaining High Resolution Depth Information

A low-cost active vision head with ten degrees of freedom is presented that has been build from off-the-shelf parts. To obtain high resolution depth information of fixated objects in the scene a general purpose calibration procedure is proposed which estimates intrinsic and extrinsic camera parameters including the vergence axes of both cameras. To produce enhanced dense depth maps a hierarchical block matching procedure is presented that employs color information. To simplify the development of controlling strategies for the head a modular hierarchy is applied that distributes various tasks among different levels employing basic capabilities of the components of the head.