Detection method for auto guide vehicle’s walking deviation based on image thinning and Hough transform

Auto guide vehicle’s position deviation always appears in its walking process. Current edge approaches applied in the visual navigation field are difficult to meet the high-level requirements of complex environment in factories since they are easy to be affected by noise, which results in low measurement accuracy and unsteadiness. In order to avoid the defects of edge detection algorithm, an improved detection method based on image thinning and Hough transform is proposed to solve the problem of auto guide vehicle’s walking deviation. First, the image of lane line is preprocessed with gray processing, threshold segmentation, and mathematical morphology, and then, the refinement algorithm is employed to obtain the skeleton of the lane line, combined with Hough detection and line fitting, the equation of the guide line is generated, and finally, the value of auto guide vehicle’s walking deviation can be calculated. The experimental results show that the methodology we proposed can deal with non-ideal factors of the actual environment such as bright area, path breaks, and clutters on road, and extract the parameters of the guide line effectively, after which the value of auto guide vehicle’s walking deviation is obtained. This method is proved to be feasible for auto guide vehicle in indoor environment for visual navigation.