Automatic Vergence Control Based on Hierarchical Segmentation of Stereo Pairs

ABSTRACT: This article presents a video system to focus an object of interest in the field of view by means of a stereo robotic head. The system relies on a new hierarchical segmentation technique that split the stereo pair into regions in a combined way. After segmentation is achieved, resulting regions in both images are implicitly related by a set of links and, consequently, their disparity can be estimated. Then, the cameras vergence is changed according to the estimated dispar-ity until the object of interest is focused. The system has proven to be robust against mild noise and illumination changes. Its main advan-tage is that calibration is not a critical issue for the system to work