Dynamic Stereo in Visual Navigation

Visual processing is very important for robot navigation. In this framework the detection of corridors of free space along the robot trajectory is certainly a very important capability to safely navigate. Stereo vision and motion parallax can be used as cues to infer scene structure and determine free space areas. In this paper we propose a cooperative schema in which binocular disparity, computed on several stereo images over time, is combined with optical flow from the same sequence to obtain a relative-depth map of the scene. Both time-bimpact and depth scaled by the distance of the camera from the fixation point in space are considered as good, relative measurements which are based on the viewer (but centered on the environment). Two experiments, performed on image sequences from real scenes, are presented.