An Integrated System based on Binocular Learned Receptive Fields for Saccade-vergence on Visually Salient Targets

The human visual system uses saccadic and vergence eyes movements to foveate interesting objects with both eyes, and thus exploring the visual scene. To mimic this biological behavior in active vision, we proposed a bio-inspired integrated system able to learn a functional sensory representation of the environment, together with the motor commands for binocular eye coordination, directly by interacting with the environment itself. The proposed architecture, rather than sequentially combining different functionalities, is a robust integration of different modules that rely on a front-end of learned binocular receptive fields to specialize on different sub-tasks. The resulting modular architecture is able to detect salient targets in the scene and perform precise binocular saccadic and vergence movement on it. The performances of the proposed approach has been tested on the iCub Simulator, providing a quantitative evaluation of the computational potentiality of the learned sensory and motor resources.