Detection of local plane areas based on stereo range data for safe driving of mobile robot

A method for finding the planar region from a 3D range image is proposed by using a plane detection cell (PDC) and Iterative Randomized Hough transform (IRHT). First, the local planar region is detected by a PDC from the target area of the range image. Each plane is then segmented by analyzing the accumulated peaks in Hough space via voting the local direction information of each PDC into Hough parameter space. The PDC is used as a plane filter to reduce the effect of noise and outliers and improve the efficiency of the HT. IRHT repeatedly decreases the size of the planar region used for voting in the Hough parameter space in order to reduce the effect of noise and provide the distinguished local maximas in the parameter space.