Obstacle detection analysis

Philippe Bobet, Cordelia Schmid

Abstract: This paper analyses the influence of the stereo camera parameters on an existing obstacle detection technique. A theoretical model is derived and evaluated for the concepts of resolution and stability. Resolution is the minimum height that an obstacle must have in order to be detected. Stability is defined as the sensitivity of detection to errors in the camera parameters. It can be seen that detection is very sensitive to some of the parameters and that there is no clear tradeoff between resolution and stability. We derive a stereo head configuration to give stable results and show how the parameters should be adapted in the context of an active vision system. Experiments confirm the theoretical results.<