3D reconstruction by a mobile robot using multi-baseline omni-directional motion stereo based on GPS/DR compound navigation system

In this paper, a unique dense 3D shape reconstruction method featuring GPS/DR coupled omni-direction multi-baseline motion stereo system is presented. The epipolar plane equation between two omni-directional vision images is computed from the GPS/DR´s position and posture information. Then, the precise epipolar lines can be obtained robustly by projecting the intersection line between the epipolar plane and the ODV´s image plane. The robust matching method featuring hybrid use of the future based matching and the area based matching, as well as the bi-directional matching which chose common mutual matching points to improve robustness is also presented. Voting process using multi-baseline is used to reduce distance error of motion stereo. Hundreds of dense range images are unified based on the precise position/posture information to generate the successive dense 3D outdoor model. The range estimation accuracy within 10 [m] area is 140 [mm], which is equal to a laser radar. It can be said that the proposed omni-directional stereo vision has robustness toward environmental complication and accurate distance estimation performance for rich textured object