New algorithm improves robot vision

Except in fanciful movies like 2003's The Matrix Revolutions, where fearsome squid-like robots maneuvered with incredible ease, most robots are too clumsy to move around obstacles at high speeds. This is true in large part because they have trouble judging in the images they "see" just how far ahead obstacles are. This week, however, Stanford computer scientists will unveil a machine vision algorithm that gives robots the ability to approximate distances from single still images. "Many people have said that depth estimation from a single monocular image is impossible," says computer science Assistant Professor Andrew Ng, who will present a paper on his research at the Neural Information Processing Systems Conference in Vancouver Dec. 5-8. "I think this work shows that in practical problems, monocular depth estimation not only works well, but can also be very useful."