2, D-28359 Bremen For some years a new way of thinking appears with respect to the solution of vision tasks. There is an important difference between the active and the classic passive as well as adaptive approach. When we work in passive mode, a set of images is given which have to be processed with the algorithms we are going to develop. On the other hand, when we work in active mode we do not want pre-recorded data since we include the image acquisition as an component of equal importance into the complete evaluation process. And this means far more than making the system adaptive to unfavourable boundary conditions such as a shading correction at unevenly illuminated scene.
Active vision offers a new approach for building intelligent and more flexible systems.
It is designed to do something, i.e. to make an action, which is anything that changes the state of the system or the environment. Similar to human perception as an active way to explore a natural scene by changing the view or the focus, the role of the observer and observation system, respectively, is defined as an active component for gathering data. Further on the strategy for solving an image analysis problem is actively influenced by use of controlled feedback loops between the components that capture the optical information and those that evaluate it. In computer vision and optical metrology sometimes the difference between a so called active and passive technique is only made with respect to the way of working with the light, i.e. illumination. For instance in shape measurement the technique shape from shading is classified as an passive technique whereas structured light illumination is called as active.