Motion Detection Based on Curved Artificial Compound Eyes

Compound eyes have the advantage of fast motion detection and significantly wide viewing field. Curved artificial compound eyes (CACEs) can perform most of the functions of real compound eyes, such as moving detection, with a wide field of view (FOV) in a small size and have attracted considerable interest owing to their unique optical structure and rapid response properties. In this work, images captured by these CACEs are used to detect the moving direction of a moving target. The subimages captured at the same time by an eye lens are enlarged, shrunk, or rotated. Temporal differences between these images captured at consecutive time intervals are calculated and compared. The minimum difference indicates the moving direction. Experiment results showed that the motion detection system can detect different lateral and axial motions in a simple and effective way.