Stereo cameras

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Stereo cameras is one method of distilling a noisy video signal into a coherent data set that a computer can begin to process into actionable symbolic objects, or abstractions.

In this approach, two cameras with a known physical relationship (i.e. what common field of view the cameras can see, and how far apart their focal points sit in physical space) are correlated via software. By finding mappings of common pixel values, and calculating how far apart these common areas reside in pixel space, a rough depth map can be created. This is very similar to how the human brain uses stereoscopic information from the eyes to gain depth cue information, i.e. how far apart any given object in the scene is from the viewer.

Stereo cameras is one of many approaches used in the broader fields of Computer Vision and Machine vision.

Other approaches include time of flight sensors and ultrasound.