Fast Free Floor Detection for Range Cameras

A robust and fast free floor detection algorithm is indispensable in autonomous or assisted navigation as it labels the drivable surface and marks obstacles. In this paper we propose a simple and fast method to segment the free floor surface in range camera data by calculating the Euclidean distance between every measured point of the point cloud and the ground plane. This method is accurate for planar motion, i.e. as long as the camera stays at a fixed height and angle above the ground plane. This is most often the case in driving mobile platforms in an indoor environment. Given this condition, the ground plane stays invariant in camera coordinates. Obstacles as low as 40 mm are reliably detected. The detection works correct even when ’multipath’ errors are present, a typical phenomenon of distance overestimation in corners when using time-of-flight range cameras. To demonstrate the application of our segmentation method, we implemented it to create a simple but accurate navigation map.