Integration and interpretation of incomplete stereo scene data

The authors extend the algorithm for stereo vision on a mobile robot in a unstructured environment to generate the 3-D b-rep of the large environment by incrementally integrating local and incomplete stereo data. The stereo vision is based on the 2-D b-reps of stereo images. The 2-D b-rep is a 2-D version of the 3-D b-rep to describe an image; the image is represented in a hierarchy of regions, boundaries, and line-segments. The b-rep is obtained for each of stereo images and the two images are matched on this data structure. The direct output of stereo is 3-D wireframes, a set of 3-D loops (boundaries) composed of 3-D line-segments, of the scene. A unique surface is then defined for each loop to make the 3-D b-rep, the consistent geometrical model, of the scene. It is necessary for the mobile robot to change views of the scene to make uninterpretable loops interpretable by finding missing segments, and thus make the complete b-rep of the scene