Abstract

We propose a method to compute the direction of heading from the differential changes in the angles between the projection rays of pairs of point features. These angles, the image deformations, do not depend on viewer rotation, so the key problem of separating the effects of rotation from those of translation is solved at the input. Experiments show both the feasibility of the method on real images and the advantages of using deformations rather than optical flow. 1 Introduction As we walk down a hallway, the moving images on our retinas convey enough information to determine our direction of heading. Several researchers have investigated how this direction could be computed, either in the human visual system or by a computer processing images from a moving camera. The main difficulty of this computation is to separate the effects of viewer rotation from those of viewer translation. In fact, with only translation the task would be quite simple: features in the image move toward or awa...

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