The goal of sensing is to take, as input, images of a scene and to provide estimates of three-dimensional characteristics of the scene as output. The work on representation is concerned with efficient visual depiction and communication of the environment. The goal of manipulation is to use the acquired three-dimensional information to perform a variety of tasks, such as navigation and assembly. A number of projects are being pursued in each of these areas. Such scene cues are identified in a single image, a stereo pair of images, a temporal sequence of one-camera images, and a temporal sequence of stereo pairs of images.
Different cues capture different aspects of interest about the scene.
A mixture of cues is used to obtain high-performance vision algorithms. Work is ongoing on the development of sensors that have novel capabilities. These sensors are integrated with the different interpretation algorithms. Research is ongoing on object recognition that involves representation of complex objects, their appearances from different viewpoints, and the development of recognition strategies and algorithms. The objective of the work in the second area is to devise compact representations of images for effectively capturing image and scene information of interest.