Grant: Idea to Innovation

Traditional machine vision systems employ a single camera with relatively small field of view (FOV). However, applications such as sports videography require a larger field of view to monitor an extended environment, as well as high resolution to resolve important details (e.g., the location of the puck in ice hockey). These two requirements are conflicting and cannot be met optimally with a single camera. Our laboratory has developed attentive sensing technology (Canadian Patent 2386347, US Patent 7130490) that meets these requirements by closely coupling two camera systems with different fields of view. The system integrates a wide field-of-view (FOV) camera providing continuous monitoring of the larger environment with a narrow FOV pan-tilt camera that can be directed to objects of interest using specialized computer vision and control software. The system thus delivers detailed information from critical targets (e.g., human faces) in the full context of the wider scene. The goal of the proposed project is to design, build, evaluate and refine next-generation commercial prototypes of this technology for emerging applications such as sports videography, remote learning and surveillance from terrestrial and unmanned aerial vehicle platforms.