Gaze Control in a Multiple-Task Active-Vision System

Very little attention has been devoted to the problem of modular composition of vision capabilities in perception-action systems. While new algorithms and techniques have paved the way for important developments, the majority of vision systems are still designed and integrated in a very primitive way according to modern software engineering principles. This paper describes the architecture of an active vision system that has been conceived to ease the concurrent utilization of the system by several visual tasks. We describe in detail the functional architecture of the system and provide several solutions to the problem of sharing the visual attention of the system when several visual tasks need to be interleaved. The system's design hides this complexity to client processes that can be designed as if they were exclusive users of the visual system. Some preliminary results on a real robotic platform are also provided