An analysis of interest operators for FIDO

FIDO is a vision and navigation system for the CMU "Rover" mobile robot. The interest operator picks distinctive points to be tracked from image to image, both for stereo pairs of images and for images taken from a different Rover position. The performance of a simple interest operator is analy/.cd, and a theory formed to explain its defects. A new interest operator is built, implementing the suggested improvements. Tests run on the original and the new interest operators, as well as on several other operators, show almost identical performance. The reasons for the lack of improvement arc discussed.