Active/Dynamic Stereo for Navigation

Abstract

Stereo vision and motion analysis have been frequently used to infer scene structure and to control the movement of a mobile vehicle or a robot arm. Unfortunately, when considered separately, these methods present intrinsic difficulties and a simple fusion of the respective results has been proved to be insufficient in practice. The paper presents a cooperative schema in which the binocular disparity is computed for corresponding points in several stereo frames and it is used, together with optical flow, to compute the time-to-impact. The formulation of the problem takes into account translation of the stereo set-up and rotation of the cameras while tracking an environmental point and performing one degree of freedom active vergence control. Experiments on a stereo sequence from a real scene are presented and discussed.