Real-time free space detection and navigation using omnidirectional vision and parametric and geometric active contours.

This paper contributes to adapt parametric and geometric active contour methods in a new framework to handle real time free space extraction while taking advantage of the properties of omnivision. Both methods were formally and algorithmically adapted and improved. Some comparative results, achieved on unknown indoor and outdoor images, are presented to validate the efficiency of our two snake based approaches. We also show that active contours can be applied to make a robot navigate autonomously, only using real omni images, thanks to the extracted free space skeleton.