Foveated imaging has been explored for compression and tele-presence, but gaps exist in the study of foveated imaging applied to acquisition and tracking systems. Results are presented from two sets of experiments comparing simple foveated and uniform resolution targeting (acquisition and tracking) algorithms. The first experiments measure acquisition performance when locating Gabor wavelet targets in noise, with fovea placement driven by a mutual information measure. The foveated approach is shown to have lower detection delay than a notional uniform resolution approach when using video that consumes equivalent bandwidth. The second experiments compare the accuracy of target position estimates from foveated and uniform resolution tracking algorithms. A technique is developed to select foveation parameters that minimize error in Kalman filter state estimates. Foveated tracking is shown to consistently outperform uniform resolution tracking on an abstract multiple target task when using video that consumes equivalent bandwidth. Performance is also compared to uniform resolution processing without bandwidth limitations. In both experiments, superior performance is achieved at a given bandwidth by foveated processing because limited resources are allocated intelligently to maximize operational performance. These findings indicate the potential for operational performance improvements over uniform resolution systems in both acquisition and tracking tasks.

Date Published: 4 May 2009
PDF: 12 pages
Proc. SPIE 7321, Bio-Inspired/Biomimetic Sensor Technologies and Applications, 73210G (4 May 2009); doi: 10.1117/12.818716

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 7321:
Bio-Inspired/Biomimetic Sensor Technologies and Applications
Nicholas F. Fell; Venkataraman S. Swaminathan, Editor(s)