The PI will investigate the stucture and function of new multiview eyes, that is new imaging devices built out of several conventional cameras. The research is motivated by the variety of eye designs in the biological world and obtains inspiration for an ensemble of computational studies that relate how a system sees to what that system does. This, coupled with the geometry and statistics of multiple views, points to new ways of constructing powerful imaging devices which suit particular tasks in robotics, visualization, video processing and augmented reality. First, the "Argus" eye will be designed and built, which is a system consisting of up to 12 cameras attached to a sphere-like structure and pointing outwards. The video cameras, equipped with a synchronizer will simultaneously record data onto disk. Next new algorithms will be developed and implemented for processing video collected by the new sensor for the purpose of very accurately estimating 3D motion and subsequently shape models of the imaged scene. how to use such models in video editing and manipulation will be shown. In the second stage of the project, new algorithms for "negative spherical eyes", i.e. networks of video cameras attached to the walls of a room pointing inwards, will be developed. The main effort will consist of algorithms for recovering descriptions of action, in particular human movement. Specifically, software will be developed for building representations of 3D motion fields, and these structures will be analyzed using geometric and statistical techniques to develop invariant characterizations of action. It is expected that these developments will have a strong impact to automatic animation.
