Real-time 3D reconstruction for mobile robot using catadioptric cameras

This paper presents a 3-second 3D reconstruction algorithm able to process a dense geometric approximation of the surrounding environment. Image acquisition is done by a stereoscopic panoramic system with two color catadioptric cameras mounted on a mobile robot. An algorithm running on a Graphical Processing Unit (GPU) processes the 3D reconstruction in real-time. As the camera system moves, new views of the scene are used to improve the model of the scene thanks to an incremental algorithm. Then, the performance of our approach is evaluated using a synthetic image sequence.