An Efficient Approach to Onboard Stereo Vision System Pose Estimation

Abstract--This paper presents an efficient technique for estimating the pose of an onboard stereo vision system relative to the environment's dominant surface area, which is supposed to be the road surface. Unlike previous approaches, it can be used either for urban or highway scenarios since it is not based on a specific visual traffic feature extraction but on 3-D raw data points. The whole process is performed in the Euclidean space and consists of two stages. Initially, a compact 2-D representation of the original 3-D data points is computed. Then, a RANdom SAmple Consensus (RANSAC) based least-squares approach is used to fit a plane to the road. Fast RANSAC fitting is obtained by selecting points according to a probability function that takes into account the density of points at a given depth. Finally, stereo camera height and pitch angle are computed related to the fitted road plane. The proposed technique is intended to be used in driverassistance systems for applications ...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: TITS
• Authors: Angel Domingo Sappa, Fadi Dornaika, Daniel Ponsa, David Gerónimo, Antonio M. López
• Keywords: Data Points, Dominant Surface Area, Onboard Stereo Vision, TITS 2008