The ALCATECH Project
by Jens Arnspang
Within information technology, vision
has been studied for decades, perhaps without the feedback to industrial
applications as originally expected nor with a full insight into the capabilities
of visual exploration of a scene. Common to most efforts has been the study
and use of ordinary, commercially available cameras as found commercially
available. Within scientific analysis and paradigm building in computational
vision the pinhole model has predominantly been used, very much in the
same spirit as the Camera Obscura.
Project ALCATECH, whose acronym stands for Alternative Camera Technology,
is aimed at studying a series of alternatives to the cameras used hitherto.
Breaking existing technical dogmas, inspiration is taken from animal life,
where many special purpose eyes (cameras), retinas (sensor chips) and visual
tools (optic accessories) are found. There are no standardised eyes in
the animal world. On the contrary, different species have surprisingly
different vision and display an astonishingly wide variety of eye constructions.
Underlying all this variation is the fact that eyes in a hand-in-glove
fashion are extremely well adapted to the common tasks a biological
creature is involved in, as well as to their environment. Cameras, or more
generally optomechanic systems, must also be tailored to fit the task,
as well as its operational environment. Nature needs many kinds of eyes
and, analogously, there is a need for many kinds of cameras. For a given
application or problem domain, a specially tailored optic system, photo
sensor design or electronic hardware may convert a hard visual task to
an easy, or at least, tractable, problem.
A first ALCATECH Workshop was held at Sjaellands Odde, Denmark, July
1996, hosted by DK SNF and US ONR, organised by Jens Arnspang, DIKU (see
communication below) and Ruzena Bajcsy, University of Pennsylvania. The
workshop was generously hosted by Ruzena Bajcsy and officially attended
and reviewed by Director Bruce Barnes, ONR Washington, through whom the
review may be obtained.
The goal of ALCATECH is to use available technological processes (mainly
optics, solid state technology and algorithmic processing) to design and
implement engineering solutions to specific (yet relevant) visual-based
tasks. Central efforts of ALCATECH will be centred on models and implementations
of visual capabilities, also borrowing inspiration from the somewhat forgotten
techniques of integral photography, invented around the turn of the century.
These capabilities are intentionally tailored to a range of visual tasks
in order to accelerate a breakthrough in automatic visual inspection and
in digital camera technology - for the benefit of both sciences and not
least European industry.
Please contact:
Jens Arnspang - University of Copenhagen
Tel: +45 35 32 14 00
E-mail: arnspang@diku.dk
