Planar direct method: a new framework for stereo vision based guidance and obstacle detection

In the context of real-time collision/obstacle avoidance this paper investigates an improvement of a direct method of estimating dense scene structure and image motion. Our proposed method combines stereo-vision (involving geometric constraints), optical flow (involving photometric constraints) and additional model constraints. Modifications to the direct method are introduced through a planarity constraint, an illumination model and a new computational framework in order to deal with significant illumination drifts and obstacle detection on static objects or moving vehicle. Experimental results on real image sequences demonstrate the effectiveness of the method.