Visual perception is one of the most important sources of information for both humans and robots. A particular challenge is the acquisition and interpretation of complex unstructured scenes. This work contributes to active vision for humanoid robots. A semantic model of the scene is created, which is extended by successively changing the robot's view in order to explore interaction possibilities of the scene.

This book defines the emerging field of Active Perception which calls for studying perception coupled with action. It is devoted to technical problems related to the design and analysis of intelligent systems possessing perception such as the existing biological organisms and the "seeing" machines of the future. Since the appearance of the first technical results on active vision, researchers began to realize that perception -- and intelligence in general -- is not transcendental and disembodied. It is becoming clear that in the effort to build intelligent visual systems, consideration must be given to the fact that perception is intimately related to the physiology of the perceiver and the tasks that it performs. This viewpoint -- known as Purposive, Qualitative, or Animate Vision -- is the natural evolution of the principles of Active Vision. The seven chapters in this volume present various aspects of active perception, ranging from general principles and methodological matters to technical issues related to navigation, manipulation, recognition, learning, planning, reasoning, and topics related to the neurophysiology of intelligent systems.

This selective vision is based on an understanding and analysis of the driving task. We illustrate the effectiveness of request-driven routines by comparing the computational cost of general scene analysis with that of selective vision in simulated driving situations."

T. Viéville: A Few Steps Towards 3D Active Vision appears as Vol. 33 in the Springer Series in Information Sciences. A specific problem in the field of active vision is analyzed, namely how suitable is it to explicitly use 3D visual cues in a reactive visual task? The author has collected a set of studies on this subject and has used these experimental and theoretical developments to propose a synthetic view on the problem, completed by some specific experiments. With this book scientists and graduate students will have a complete set of methods, algorithms, and experiments to introduce 3D visual cues in active visual perception mechanisms, e.g. autocalibration of visual sensors on robotic heads and mobile robots. Analogies with biological visual systems provide an easy introduction to this subject.