Perceptual computational advantages of tracking

The paradigm of active vision advocates studying visual problems in the form of modules that are directly related to a visual task for observers that are active. It is argued that in many cases when an object is moving in an unrestricted manner (translation and rotation) in the 3D world only the motion's translational components are of interest. For a monocular observer, using only the normal flow-the spatiotemporal derivatives of the image intensity function-the authors solve the problem of computing the direction of translation. Their strategy uses fixation and tracking. Fixation simplifies much of the computation by placing the object at the center of the visual field, and the main advantage of tracking is the accumulation of information over time. The authors show how tracking is accomplished using normal flow measurements and use it for two different tasks in the solution process. First, it serves as a tool to compensate for the lack of existence of an optical flow field and thus to estimate the translation parallel to the image plane; and second, it gathers information about the motion component perpendicular to the image plane