9503996 Brown In this project the effort will be concentrated on (1) building an active vision system that uses PUMA or SARCOS manipulators to control the camera's position, and (2) using and extending existing techniques for recovering shape from images of a curved object's occluding contour. Because the camera moves around the object in a continuous fashion, camera position control and model-building will be modeled as two continuous, interdependent processes that occur simultaneously and operate in real-time. The work on camera position control will focus on controlling the camera's position in real-time, and on imposing as few camera and manipulator calibration requirements as possible. The work on model-building will focus on developing real-time curve tracking methods that can handle the connectivity changes of occluding contour curves, and on implementing and evaluating existing shape-from-contour techniques. This research will provide a better understanding of the practical issues in moving a camera to build models of curved objects with complex surface geometry. ***
