A smart buffer for tracking using motion data

Responsive vision is vision responding to the environment. The characteristics of a responsive system are: active response in dynamic environment, real time computation, and using multiple modalities in a multi-purpose system. The vision engine is a general purpose for general vision tasks. Early vision processing, e.g., optical flow and stereo is implemented in near real-time using the Datacube, producing dense displacement fields at near video rates, which are then transferred to a transputer subsystem, where data dependent processing occurs in parallel on subimages. The authors use the vision engine for complex processing under real-time constraints, the differences between the processing rates in a robotic system require smart buffers, objects that can buffer data between perception, reasoning and action processes. Smart buffers offer a simple interface between asynchronous processing tasks and simplify the structure of multiprocessor vision systems. The authors describe a simple motion tracker that uses a smart buffer to mediate between early and middle vision processing. The smart buffer permits the system to sense during action by letting the sensing component accumulate visual data in the course of action.