APPARATUS AND METHOD FOR THE CONSTRUCTION OF SPATIAL REPRESENTATIONS

摘要

The present invention relates to a method and apparatus for constructing spatial representations of referents. The invention has applications in any area where a spatial representation of a referent is required. Examples are image processing and machine vision. In image processing the "referents" are signal sources which are being viewed by an image processing sensor, eg CCD array. The image sources will be points in a scene, for example. In order to produce an organised image, the image system must be aware of the relative positions of the image sensors. In the prior art, this information is usually provided a priori. In the present invention, no a priori information on the arrangement of the image sensors is required. Instead, a geometrical representation of the referents is produced by obtaining signals from the referents and utilising the signals in order to provide the geometrical representation. The geometrical representation is built up purely from the signals provided by the sensors themselves. The invention assumes that behavioural differences between signals for any two referents imply a distance between the referents, and this assumption is utilised in order to build up the geometrical representation of the referents.