Rotating Periscope Based 3D Sensor

For humans and visual animals vision it is the primary and the most sophisticated perceptual modality to get information about the surrounding world. Depth perception is a part of vision allowing to accurately determine the distance to an object which makes it an important visual task. Humans have two eyes with overlapping visual fields that enable stereo vision and thus space perception. Some birds however do not have overlapping visual fields, and compensate this lask by moving their heads, which in turn makes space perception possible using the motion parallax as a visual cue. This paper presents a solution using an optomechanical filter that was inspired by the way birds observe their environment. The filtering is done using two different approaches:using motion blur during motion parallax, and using the optical flow algorithm. The two methods have different advantages and drawbacks, which will be discussed in the paper. The proposed system can be used in robotics for 3D space perception.