Max Robotics — Global Service Robot Directory + US Certification

About

Carl-Johan Westelius is a pioneering researcher in active vision and robot control, whose work has fundamentally shaped how robotic systems perceive and interact with their environments. His primary research areas include gaze control, attention mechanisms, and advanced signal processing for computer vision. Westelius’s most influential contribution is his 1995 thesis on focus of attention and gaze control for robot vision (61 citations), which introduced a hierarchical framework for gaze control in active vision systems. This work, along with his 1996 paper on attention control (20 citations), established novel methods for neglecting irrelevant sensory data using normalized convolution—a technique that separates signal from certainty to handle missing or irregular data. His 1992 paper on preattentive gaze control (15 citations) further advanced the field by implementing these ideas on simulated robots equipped with foveated imaging systems. Beyond vision, Westelius made significant contributions to signal processing with his 2002 work on filtering uncertain, irregularly sampled multidimensional data (12 citations), which introduced normalized and differential convolution. His 1994 report on the Application Visualization System (4 citations) also demonstrates his broader impact in scientific visualization. With a career spanning foundational robotics and computational methods, Westelius’s work remains essential reading for researchers in active perception and sensorimotor control.