Planar Region Extraction for Visual Navigation using Stereo Cameras

In this paper, we propose an algorithm to extract valid planar regions from stereo images for visual navigation of mobile robots. The algorithm is based on the difference image between the stereo images obtained by applying Homography matrix between stereo cameras. Illegal planar regions are filtered out by the use of labeling of the difference images and filtering of invalid blobs using the size of each blob. Also, illegal large planar regions such as walls are removed by adopting a weighted low-pass filtering of the difference image using the past difference images. The algorithms are experimented successfully by the use of stereo camera system built in a mobile robot and a PC-based real-time vision system.