Weakly-calibrated stereo perception for rover navigation

Presents a vision system for autonomous navigation based on stereo perception without 3D reconstruction. This approach uses weakly calibrated stereo images, i.e. images for which only the epipolar geometry is known. The vision system first rectifies the images, matches selected points between the two images, and then computes the relative elevation of the points relative to a reference plane as well as the images of their projections on this plane. We have integrated this vision module into a complete navigation system. In this system, the relative elevation is used as a shape indicator in order to compute appropriate steering directions everytime a new stereo pair is processed. We have conducted initial experiments in unstructured, outdoor environments with an wheeled rover.<<ETX>>

[1]  Amnon Shashua,et al.  Projective depth: A geometric invariant for 3D reconstruction from two perspective/orthographic views and for visual recognition , 1993, 1993 (4th) International Conference on Computer Vision.

[2]  Charles Hansen,et al.  Rectification of images for binocular and trinocular stereovision , 1988, [1988 Proceedings] 9th International Conference on Pattern Recognition.

[3]  Olivier D. Faugeras,et al.  Relative 3D positioning and 3D convex hull computation from a weakly calibrated stereo pair , 1993, 1993 (4th) International Conference on Computer Vision.

[4]  Olivier D. Faugeras,et al.  Relative 3D positioning and 3D convex hull computation from a weakly calibrated stereo pair , 1995, Image Vis. Comput..

[5]  Olivier D. Faugeras,et al.  What can be seen in three dimensions with an uncalibrated stereo rig , 1992, ECCV.

[6]  O. D. Faugeras,et al.  Camera Self-Calibration: Theory and Experiments , 1992, ECCV.

[7]  Martial Hebert,et al.  A Reactive System For Off-Road Navigation , 1994 .

[8]  Martial Hebert,et al.  Deriving Orientation Cues from Stereo Images , 1994, ECCV.

[9]  Bill Ross,et al.  A practical stereo vision system , 1993, Proceedings of IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition.

[10]  Rajiv Gupta,et al.  Computing matched-epipolar projections , 1993, Proceedings of IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition.

[11]  Rachid Deriche,et al.  A Robust Technique for Matching two Uncalibrated Images Through the Recovery of the Unknown Epipolar Geometry , 1995, Artif. Intell..

[12]  Olivier Faugeras,et al.  Applications of non-metric vision to some visual guided tasks , 1994, Proceedings of 12th International Conference on Pattern Recognition.

[13]  Fabio Gagliardi Cozman,et al.  Stereo Driving and Position Estimation for Autonomous Planetary Rovers , 1994 .

[14]  Larry H. Matthies,et al.  Stereo vision for planetary rovers: Stochastic modeling to near real-time implementation , 1991, Optics & Photonics.

[15]  Alonzo Kelly.  A Partial Analysis of the High Speed Autonomous Navigation Problem , 1994 .

[16]  S. P. Mudur,et al.  Three-dimensional computer vision: a geometric viewpoint , 1993 .

[17]  Emanuele Trucco,et al.  Geometric Invariance in Computer Vision , 1995 .