DIJIT: A Robotic Head for an Active Observer

TL;DR

DIJIT is a versatile robotic head designed for active vision research, mimicking human eye and head movements to study their impact on visual perception and improve computer vision methods.

Contribution

The paper introduces DIJIT, a robotic head with nine mechanical and four optical degrees of freedom, and a new saccadic movement method closely resembling human eye movements.

Findings

DIJIT's mechanical design ranges and speeds match human performance.

The new saccadic movement method achieves high accuracy similar to humans.

DIJIT enables exploration of eye-head coordination in vision tasks.

Abstract

We present DIJIT, a novel binocular robotic head expressly designed for mobile agents that behave as active observers. DIJIT's unique breadth of functionality enables active vision research and the study of human-like eye and head-neck motions, their interrelationships, and how each contributes to visual ability. DIJIT is also being used to explore the differences between how human vision employs eye/head movements to solve visual tasks and current computer vision methods. DIJIT's design features nine mechanical degrees of freedom, while the cameras and lenses provide an additional four optical degrees of freedom. The ranges and speeds of the mechanical design are comparable to human performance. Our design includes the ranges of motion required for convergent stereo, namely, vergence, version, and cyclotorsion. The exploration of the utility of these to both human and machine vision is ongoing. Here, we present the design of DIJIT and evaluate aspects of its performance. We present a new method for saccadic camera movements. In this method, a direct relationship between camera orientation and motor values is developed. The resulting saccadic camera movements are close to human movements in terms of their accuracy.