Attracted by light: vision-based steering virtual characters among dark and light obstacles

This paper introduces the use of numerical optical flow (OF) in vision-based steering techniques - that control characters locomotion trajectories by using a simulation of their visual perception. In contrast with synthetic OF that was previously used, numerical OF is sensitive to the contrast of objects, and provides, for example, uncertain results in dark areas. Thus, we here propose a locomotion control technique which is robust to such uncertainty: dark areas in the scene are processed as obstacles, that however may be traversed in case of necessity. As demonstrated in various scenarios, this tends to make character avoiding darkest areas, or traversing them more carefully, as it can be observed for real humans.

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