Cyclopean geometry of binocular vision

Abstract

The geometry of binocular projection is analyzed in relation to the primate visual system. An oculomotor parameterization, which includes the classical vergence and version angles, is defined. It is shown that the epipolar geometry of the system is constrained by binocular coordination of the eyes. A local model of the scene is adopted, in which depth is measured relative to a plane containing the fixation point. These constructions lead to an explicit parameterization of the binocular disparity field, involving the gaze angles as well as the scene structure. The representation of visual direction and depth is discussed, with reference to the relevant psychophysical and neurophysiological literature.

Online multimodal speaker detection for humanoid robots

“…This allows to reconstruct a 3D point, S n , that can be viewed as 3D face center. See [6] for more details. The use of faces drastically simplifies the complexity of the approach because a single semantically-meaningful face center replaces a cloud of points associated with a, possibly moving, 3D object.…”

Autonomous learning of disparity–vergence behavior through distributed coding and population reward: Basic mechanisms and real-world conditioning on a robot stereo head

“…The geometry of the modeled binocular vision system is characterized by a common elevation for the left and right cameras, and independent azimuth angles, as in the Helmholtz reference frame [46]. This configuration yields a simplified parametrization of the visual direction in terms of version and vergence (α) angles, where, the vergence control necessary to move the fixation point, while keeping constant the gaze direction, is applied symmetrically on both the eyes [23]: ∆α = − arctan(v S /2f c ).…”

Bio-Inspired Active Vision Paradigms in Surveillance Applications

“…The wide-angle camera is used for a wide view of the scene, and it becomes the reference of the system. In vision research, the cyclopean point is considered the most natural centre of a binocular system (Helmholtz, 1925) and it is used to characterise stereopsis in human vision (Hansard & Horaud, 2008;Koenderink & van Doorn, 1976). By doing a similar approximation, the three-camera model uses the wide-angle-camera image as the cyclopean image of the system.…”