A Stereo Vision System for Support of Planetary Surface Exploration

In this paper a system will be presented that was developed for ESA for the support of planetary exploration. The system that is sent to the planetary surface consists of a rover and a lander. The lander contains a stereo head equipped with a pan-tilt mechanism. This vision system is used both for modeling of the terrain and for localization of the rover. Both tasks are necessary for the navigation of the rover. Due to the stress that occurs during the flight a recalibration of the stereo vision system is required once it is deployed on the planet. Due to practical limitations it is infeasible to use a known calibration pattern for this purpose and therefore a new calibration procedure had to be developed that can work on images of the planetary environment. This automatic procedure recovers the relative orientation of the cameras and the pan- and tilt-axis, besides the exterior orientation for all the images. The same images are subsequently used to recover the 3D structure of the te...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2001
• Where: ICVS
• Authors: Maarten Vergauwen, Marc Pollefeys, Luc J. Van Gool
• Keywords: Computer Vision, Disparity Maps, ICVS 2001, Planetary Exploration, Terrain