Obstacle Detection Using a Single Camera Stereo Sensor

In this paper we present a catadioptric stereovision system based on a single camera, two plane mirrors and a prism mounted on a rotating axis. On the one hand, the system is able to project a real scene on two half images. Thus, contrary to classical stereo system, it deals with the problem of the camera synchronisation. On the other hand, the optical axis of the system can be steered to point a region of interest of the real scene. It has been developed in the context of on-road vehicle applications and more specifically for long-range road surveillance. This degree of liberty is useful when the region of interest is far away in the front of the vehicle because it requires a long focal length to reach a sufficient resolution. This optical system is associated to a dense stereo matching algorithm and a disparity map segmentation process. We present some results we have obtained using synthetic stereo images to illustrate the functionality of this setup.