Vision-based Detection of Stair-cases

Stair-cases are useful environmental landmarks for navigation in mobility aids for the partially sighted. In this paper, a texture detection method using Gabor Filters is proposed to detect distant stair-cases. When close enough, stair-cases are then detected by looking for groups of concurrent lines, where convex and concave edges are partitioned using intensity variation information. Stair-case pose is estimated by a homography search approach. Using an a priori stair-case model, search criteria and constraints are established to find its vertical rotation and slope. These algorithms have been applied to both synthetic and real images with promising results.

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