Learning Actions and Control of Focus of Attention with a Log-Polar-like Sensor

Abstract: With the long-term goal of reducing the image processing time on an autonomous mobile robot in mind we explore in this paper the use of log-polar like image data with gaze control. The gaze control is not done on the Cartesian image but on the log-polar like image data. For this we start out from the classic deep reinforcement learning approach for Atari games. We extend an A3C deep RL approach with an LSTM network, and we learn the policy for playing three Atari games and a policy for gaze control. While the Atari games already use low-resolution images of 80 by 80 pixels, we are able to further reduce the amount of image pixels by a factor of 5 without losing any gaming performance.