Estimation of vertical surfaces directions in outdoor environments on changes of the incident angle of sunlight in time series of observation images

摘要

This paper proposes a method to estimate the directions of vertical surfaces in outdoor environments based on the changes of the incident angle of the sunlight in a series of observation images caught with a fixed camera. This method uses an interaction between a time when an incidence angle of the sunlight for every direction of a vertical surface is at the minimum and a time when a brightness of every pixel in the series of observation image is at the maximum. This method is not robust about the weather changes. This paper introduces the method integrating multi-day estimations. With this multi-day integration, the proposed direction estimation method is robust about the weather changes. And then, this paper shows experiments on real out-door images.