Layered ground floor detection for vision-based mobile robot navigation

This paper proposes a method of detecting movable paths for visual navigation of mobile robots. The algorithm is to detect and segment the ground floor by computing plane normals from motion fields in image sequences. A plane normal in 3D space is an effective clue to detect other static or moving objects on the ground floor and can be computed from point correspondences and planar homographies. Such plane normals are combined together with iterative refinement processes based on image segmentation techniques and then allow us to detect and segment the ground floor accurately although mismatched point correspondences are detected in image sequences. The preliminary experiments on real data demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.