Stereo Vision for Obstacle Detection: a Graph-Based Approach
Résumé
We propose a new approach to stereo matching for obstacle detection
in the autonomous navigation framework. An accurate but slow reconstruction
of the 3D scene is not needed; rather, it is more important to have a fast
localization of the obstacles to avoid them. All the methods in the literature,
based on a punctual stereo matching, are ineffective in realistic contexts
because they are either computationally too expensive, or unable to deal with
the presence of uniform patterns, or of perturbations between the left and right
images. Our idea is to face the stereo matching problem as a matching between
homologous regions. The stereo images are represented as graphs and a graph
matching is computed to find homologous regions. Our method is strongly
robust in a realistic environment, requires little parameter tuning, and is
adequately fast, as experimentally demonstrated in a comparison with the best
algorithms in the literature.