We present a homography-based approach to detect the ground plane from monocular sequences captured by a robot platform. By assuming that the camera is fixed on the robot platform and can at most rotate horizontally, we derive the constraints that the homograph of the ground plane must satisfy and then use these constraints to design algorithms for detecting the ground plane. Due to the reduced degree of freedom, the resultant algorithm is not only more efficient and robust, but also able to avoid false detection due to virtual planes. We present experiments with real data from a robot platform to validate the proposed approaches. Index Terms -Vision-based navigation, homography 1. INTRODUCTION In mobile robot navigation, one of the fundamental problems is obstacle avoidance. Among various possibilities, vision-based obstacle avoidance has always been one attractive option. This is even more so nowadays with the availability of low-cost imaging sensors and compact yet high-performance processors as a result of recent technology development. There are different vision-based approaches to obstacle avoidance. In this paper, we focus on the problem of ground plane detection, which entails naturally obstacle detection, since in many applications the mobile robot may be considered to maneuver on a planar surface and thus obstacle detection may be reduced to the problem of ground plane detection: With the ground plane detected, other objects can be viewed as obstacles if they are on the direction of movement and outside of the ground plane. Various approaches have been proposed to address the problem of ground detection. For example, simple approaches identify the ground floor using color information [2, 4, 7] . While being simple to implement, these approaches are suitable only for very specific environments. To handle general environments, a few systems attempt to recover the structure of the scene. To this end, different techniques have been used. For example, the work in [3, 6] uses stereo vision for this purpose. Presently, monocular vision based approaches
Zhou and Baoxin REF presented a solution for obstacle detection using homography based ground plane estimation algorithm.
Robust Ground Plane Detection with Normalized Homography in Monocular Sequences from a Robot Platform
2006 International Conference on Image Processing
2006 International Conference on Image Processing
Computer Science