This paper gives an overview of our five years project on Cooperative Distributed Vision (CDV, in short). From a practical point of view, the goal of CDV is summarized as follows:
Embed in the real world a group of network-connected Observation
Stations (real time image processor with active camera(s))
and mobile robots with vision, and realize
1. robust, flexible, and real time dynamic real world
scene understanding, and
2. versatile image media capturing, generation, and editing.
Applications of CDV include real time wide area surveillance, remote
conference and lecturing systems, interactive 3D TV and intelligent TV
studio, navigation of mobile robots and disabled people, cooperative
mobile robots, and so on.
The aim of the project is not to develop these specific application
systems but to establish scientific and technological foundations to
realize CDV systems enough capable to work persistently in the real
world.
From a scientific point of view, we put our focus upon
Integration of Perception, Action, and Communication. That is, the
scientific goal of the project is to investigate how these three
functions should be integrated to realize intelligent systems; we
believe that intelligence does not dwell solely in brain but emerges
from active interactions with environments through perception, action,
and communication.
Technological developments by the project include versatile and
high precision vision sensors, real time vision hardwares and
softwares, robust and flexible vision algorithms, communication
protocols for cooperation and so on.
In this paper, we first present our motivation, research goal and
basic ideas of CDV and then discuss technical issues with several
preliminary experimental results.
