Selective Acquisition of 3D Structure with an Active Stereo Vision System

摘要

With a robot moving in an unknown environment, it is absolutely necessary to acquire the information about the 3D structure of the scene. In this article, a new method is proposed to selectively acquire the 3D structure around free spaces needed for a mobile robot with an active stereo vision system that can fixate on a 3D Point of the scene. The proposed method consists of the following two processes. (1) First, an active stereo camera is arranged in parallel, and then the direction in which promising free spaces exist is estimated and selected. (2) The 3D objects existing in the selected direction are reconstructed with successive ver- gence movements of the stereo camera. The proposed method allows the selective recovery of 3D structure needed for robot movements and is much more efficient than Previous methods involving generation of 3D descrip- tion of the whole scene through the uniform analysis of sensor information. Experiments with an actual scene show the effectiveness of the proposed method.