An advanced vision sensor with fovea

A novel concept of a vision sensor with a fovea is presented, and the possibility of its application for online machine control is demonstrated. This sensor is designed to approximate the visual mechanism of the human eye, which has a fovea (high-resolution attention zone) in its field of view and executes the necessary movements of the viewpoint. The vision sensor consists of a conventional matrix charge-coupled device (CCD) camera and a distortion lens that enlarges the image in the fovea and compresses the one in the peripheral zone. The process of image recognition is simulated by computer. The results show that the proposed sensor serves to significantly reduce the amount of information required per scene