Accurate vergence control in complex scenes

In binocular visual systems, vergence is the process of directing the gaze so that the optical axes intersect at a surface point. Correlation-based methods of disparity analysis provide fast estimates of the vergence error. Unfortunately most correlation techniques do not provide mechanisms to determine which image locations contributed to a given correlation peak. The result is that large correlation peaks may have contributions from image arena not relevant to the vergence task. This paper presents a vergence system that applies a cepstral filter to multiscale images obtained from a dominant-eye binocular sensor. As used by this system, the cepstral filter has two main advantages: it enhances targets through narrow-band signal suppression, and it supports a back-projection operation to determine the image locations associated with particular correlation peaks. The use of multiscale images allows the system to have both high resolution for precision in the final vergence and a large field of view for a wide range of initial camera orientations without undue computational cost