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Vision is one
of the guiding senses for humans and other living creatures. Vision plays
a particularly important role as one of the far senses, that provide information
about things beyond our immediate reach. It is also important because the
existence of ambient light and the resolution that visual light gives over
a large field of view.
CVAP is doing research in computational vision, robotics and related problems in geometric modeling and computing. The group was formed in 1982 and has now almost 30 researchers, graduate students and visiting scientists. Seeing Robots A central research theme at CVAP is the development of a computer based seeing agent capable of using vision in its interaction with the environment, for e.g. manoeuvring, navigating, grasping and recognizing things. This work is being implemented as "seeing robots" and addresses basic issues on gaze control, attention, figure-ground segmentation, cue integration, and recognition, as well as systems and control issues. A second theme that underpins much of this and other work concerns early vision processing and the computation of scene characteristics. Considerable efforts are being devoted to feature and structure extraction at multiple scales. One of the goals is to develop the notion of a visual-front-end, which can provide a first processing layer for the mentioned seeing agent. Visual Navigation Another central topic deals with the derivation geometric invariants and their use in deriving scene structure and in tasks such as visual navigation. Properties invariant under perspective and projective transformations can be used to establish image correspondence and to tracking. They also provide a means for model indexing in visual recognition. The latter problem is also studied using other approaches, e.g. based on appearance and also involving learning. The overall goal is to include also these techniques and capabilities in our long-term work on the seeing agent. In addition to these efforts the group is also developing frameworks and computational environments for performing geometric reasoning and analysis as well as for representing geometric objects such as surfaces and volumes. This work has potential applications in computer vision but is also aimed at the study and teaching of geometry as such. Projects & Research partners CVAP is currently a partner in two long term programs supported by The Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research, SSF, namely Autonomous Systems and Visual Information Technology. The Center for Autonomous Systems has a large part of its activity at CVAP. Other support comes from The Swedish Council for Engineering Science and from European projects within ESPRIT, EC:s TMR program and ESTEC. In 1996 a special issue of the International Journal of Computer Vision, Vol. 17:2, was devoted to the work of the CVAP group. The CVAP group has extensive international research collaborations and interact with industry in particular through the two SSF programs. Companies involved in them include ABB, Electrolux, Permobil, Ericsson and Telia. |