Estimation of Depth from Motion Using an Anthropomorphic Visual Sensor

The application of an anthropomorphic, retina-like visual sensor for optical flow and depth estimation is presented. The main advantage, obtained with the non-uniform sampling, is considerable data reduction, while a high spatial resolution is preserved in the part of the field of view corresponding to the focus of attention. As for depth estimation, a tracking egomotion strategy is adopted which greatly simplifies the motion equations, and naturally fits with the characteristics of the retinal sensor (the displacement is smaller wherever the image resolution is higher). A quantitative error analysis is carried out, determining the uncertainty of range measurements. An experiment, performed on a real image sequence, is presented.