Detection and pursuit of independently moving agents

The article tries to foster the discussion on cooperative processing of multiple modules, i.e., flow field monitoring (egomotion detection), target fixation (independent motion detection) and approach (teleotaxis) in order to achieve robust more complex behaviors. The research investigates first the usefulness of visual flow field information for the robotic navigation task of independent motion detection. This task is considered non-trivial for the case of moving observers. The derived qualitative information is then used for a novel automatic initialization of an active contour model which locks onto the desired agent´s apparent contours for subsequent pursuit.