Accessible section detection for visual guidance

We address the problem of determining the accessible section in front of a walking person. In our definition, the accessible section is the spatial region that is not blocked by obstacles. For this purpose, we use gradients to calculate surface normals on the depth map and subsequently determine the accessible section using these surface normals. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach on a novel, challenging dataset. The dataset consists of urban outdoor and indoor scenes that were recorded with a handheld stereo camera.

[1]  Luc Van Gool,et al.  Moving obstacle detection in highly dynamic scenes , 2009, 2009 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[2]  P. Lombardi,et al.  Unified stereovision for ground, road, and obstacle detection , 2005, IEEE Proceedings. Intelligent Vehicles Symposium, 2005..

[3]  Juan Manuel Saez Martinez,et al.  Stereo-based Aerial Obstacle Detection for the Visually Impaired , 2008 .

[4]  Dennis Mitzel Close-Range Human Detection for Head-Mounted Cameras , 2012 .

[5]  J Coughlan,et al.  A Mobile Phone Wayfinding System for Visually Impaired Users. , 2009, Assistive technology research series.

[6]  Robert C. Bolles,et al.  Random sample consensus: a paradigm for model fitting with applications to image analysis and automated cartography , 1981, CACM.

[7]  Luc Van Gool,et al.  Object Detection and Tracking for Autonomous Navigation in Dynamic Environments , 2010, Int. J. Robotics Res..

[8]  Richard O. Duda,et al.  Use of the Hough transformation to detect lines and curves in pictures , 1972, CACM.

[9]  Gérard G. Medioni,et al.  Real-time staircase detection from a wearable stereo system , 2012, Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR2012).

[10]  Liang-Gee Chen,et al.  An intelligent depth-based obstacle detection system for visually-impaired aid applications , 2012, 2012 13th International Workshop on Image Analysis for Multimedia Interactive Services.

[11]  Shraga Shoval,et al.  NavBelt and the Guide-Cane [obstacle-avoidance systems for the blind and visually impaired] , 2003, IEEE Robotics Autom. Mag..

[12]  Jean-Philippe Tarel,et al.  Real time obstacle detection in stereovision on non flat road geometry through "v-disparity" representation , 2002, Intelligent Vehicle Symposium, 2002. IEEE.

[13]  G. Medioni,et al.  RGB-D camera Based Navigation for the Visually Impaired , 2011 .

[14]  D. Thalmann,et al.  Wearable Obstacle Detection System for visually impaired People , 2005 .

[15]  Bastian Leibe,et al.  Close-Range Human Detection and Tracking for Head-Mounted Cameras , 2012, BMVC.

[16]  Berthold K. P. Horn,et al.  Determining Optical Flow , 1981, Other Conferences.

[17]  C. Laugier,et al.  Real-time moving obstacle detection using optical flow models , 2006, 2006 IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium.

[18]  Tianmiao Wang,et al.  An Infrastructure-Free Indoor Navigation System for Blind People , 2012, ICIRA.

[19]  Marc M. Van Hulle,et al.  Ground plane estimation based on dense stereo disparity , 2008 .

[20]  Michael Brady,et al.  Ground plane estimation, error analysis and applications , 2002, Robotics Auton. Syst..

[21]  Morgan Quigley,et al.  ROS: an open-source Robot Operating System , 2009, ICRA 2009.

[22]  Andreas Geiger,et al.  Efficient Large-Scale Stereo Matching , 2010, ACCV.