ADAPTIVE CAMERA REGULATION FOR INVESTIGATION OF REAL SCENES

An adaptive strategy for regulating the intrinsic parameters of a char ge coupled device (CCD) visual camera is presented, The parameter regu lation procedure is based on the computation of the ''quality'' of an acquired signal by means of a set of functions which estimate the good ness of the datum, Each function performs a quantitative evaluation bg computing several features derived from the high-frequency content of an image or from the histogram analysis. The regulation strategy uses such values to compute tile actual values of the camera parameters, i .e., focusing distance, aperture diameter, electronic gain, and black level. Moreover, the same strategy can be applied both to the whole im age and to smaller subareas, therefore providing a focus-of-attention mechanism, This is useful for automatic investigation and control of e nvironments subject to dynamically changing conditions (e.g., illumina tion and structure of a scene), whenever it is not possible to interac t directly with such environments.