Way to Go! Detecting Open Areas Ahead of a Walking Person

We determine the region in front of a walking person that is not blocked by obstacles. This is an important task when trying to assist visually impaired people or navigate autonomous robots in urban environments. We use conditional random fields to learn how to interpret texture and depth information for their accessibility. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach on a novel dataset, which consists of urban outdoor and indoor scenes that were recorded with a handheld stereo camera.

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