The material in this page is limited to research, equipment, techniques and problems specifically related to motorized binocular camera platforms. The history of computer-controlled positionable binocular camera platforms doesn't go back as far as the statue of St. Denis (the patron saint of mobile binocular platforms) on the facade of the Notre Dame Cathedral; in fact, it doesn't go back very far at all. The first systems that fall in this category emerged in the late 1980s (Krotkov, Exploratory Visual Sensing for Determining Spatial Layout with an Agile Stereo Camera System, 1987, TR-101, GRASP Lab, University of Pennsylvania; Brown et al., The Rochester Robot, 1988, TR-257, Computer Science Department, University of Rochester; Clark and Ferrier, Modal Control of an Attentive Vision System, 1988, ICCV, Harvard Robotics Lab, Harvard University). To extend it to other positionable camera systems (e.g., eye-in-hand) would encompass a very large portion of computer vision.
Much of the work to date was accomplished with components and software that were constructed from scratch. We hope that this page will facilitate communication among the small (and rapidly growing) community of researchers by improving communication among research groups and general awareness of the progress being made in this area. To reduce the amount of wheel reinvention, we have provided some pointers to equipment and techniques that have demonstrated sufficient value to be incorporated into existing systems. We actively solicit new pointers to research and equipment as well as corrections and updates to the existing page.