Coarse Image Motion for Saccade Control

We describe a 2D vision module that estimates the motion of moving objects for the purpose of driving saccadic head/eye motions to fixate them. Robustness and a fast reaction time are the main requirements of the module. The apparently moving background is segmented from the moving objects in the scene using a prediction of the background flow obtained from head odometry. Subsequently the velocities of the detected objects are determined using a least-square method to solve the aperture problem. The algorithm has been implemented at frame rate (25Hz) on a network of five transputers, and has a latency of approximately 0.06s.