PixelLaser: Evaluating monocular range from texture

Author

Leece, Michael ; Lesperance, Nicole ; Matsumoto, Steve ; Korbel, Max ; Lei, Kenny ; Dodds, Zachary

Author_Institution

Comput. Sci. Dept., Harvey Mudd Coll., Claremont, CA, USA

fYear

2011

fDate

11-12 April 2011

Firstpage

157

Lastpage

161

Abstract

This work presents and evaluates the PixelLaser system, designed to estimate range-to-obstacle scans from single images. Its visual pipeline uses nearest-neighbor texture-matching to segment groundplane (traversable) texture from non-groundplane (obstacle) texture. Using the known pose of a webcamera, the system then transforms these segmentations into range-scans. This paper presents a thorough evaluation of the range accuracy obtained in the resulting scans. In addition, it presents three practical robot applications that use PixelLaser´s monocular ranging: (a) a safe-wandering agent, (b) a Monte-Carlo localizer, and (c) a mapping system using CoreSLAM. In each case, algorithms that usually depend on laser scans have succeed with PixelLaser data instead.

Keywords

cameras; collision avoidance; image segmentation; image texture; laser ranging; optical scanners; robot vision; CoreSLAM; Monte-Carlo localizer; PixelLaser; image texture; mapping system using; monocular range; monocular ranging; nearest neighbor texture matching; nongroundplane texture; range-to-obstacle scan; robot application; safe wandering agent; visual pipeline; webcamera; Accuracy; Classification algorithms; Image segmentation; Pipelines; Pixel; Robot sensing systems; image segmentation; range estimation; visual control;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Technologies for Practical Robot Applications (TePRA), 2011 IEEE Conference on

Conference_Location

Woburn, MA

Print_ISBN

978-1-61284-482-4

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/TEPRA.2011.5753499

Filename

5753499