A binocular robotic head system with torsional eye movements

The hardware and software designs for TRISH (The Toronto Iris Stereo Head) are presented. TRISH is a robotically controlled binocular camera mount, consisting of two fixed focal length color cameras with automatic gain control forming a verging stereo pair. TRISH is capable of version (rotation of the eyes about the vertical axis so as to maintain a constant disparity), vergence (rotation of each eye about the vertical axis so as to change the disparity) pan (rotation of the entire head about the vertical axis), and tilt (rotation of each eye about the horizontal axis). Each camera can rotate about its own optical axes (torsion). Torsion movement makes it possible to minimize the vertical component of the two-dimensional search which is associated with stereo processing in verging stereo systems. TRISH also incorporates a real-time video processing subsystem capable of accepting and processing the images generated by the head