Reflections on Active (Machine) Vision

Over the past years, algorithmic approaches for the evaluation of digitized images have become more reliable provided the type of objects and their arrangement in the depicted scene as well as the scene illumination can be carefully optimized. The evaluation of images of natural scenes, however, still provides a lot of unsolved problems for algorithmic approaches. The - seemingly effortless - performance of animal and human vision has been experienced as a perpetual challenge to improve image evaluation algorithms by incorporation of new approaches. In addition, continuous improvements in the price / performance ratio of sensor and computing components facilitated the investigation of more complex approaches in order to cope with some of the problems. Attempts to evaluate color images, stereopairs, temporal image sequences recorded by monocular, binocular, or trinocular camera configurations, as well as multisensor data fusion can all be considered as examples for this development.