Dankers, A. A., Barnes, N., Bischof, W. F. and A. Zelinsky (2008). Humanoid vision resembles primate archetype [Extended version]. Springer Tracts in Advanced Robotics, (in press).

Perception in the visual cortex and dorsal stream of the primate brain includes important visual competencies, such as: a consistent representation of visual space despite eye movement; egocentric spatial perception; attentional gaze deploy- ment; and, coordinated stereo xation upon dynamic objects. These competencies have emerged commensurate with observation of the real world, and constitute a vision system that is optimised, in some sense, for perception and interaction. We present a robotic vision system that incorporates these competencies. We hypothe- sise that similarities between the underlying robotic system model and that of the primate vision system will elicit accordingly similar gaze behaviours. Psychophys- ical trials were conducted to record human gaze behaviour when free-viewing a reproducible, dynamic, 3D scene. Identical trials were conducted with the robotic system. A statistical comparison of robotic and human gaze behaviour has shown that the two are remarkably similar. Enabling a humanoid to mimic the optimised gaze strategies of humans may be a signi cant step towards facilitating human-like perception.

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