Active stereo vision and its application to industrial inspection

The use of active stereo as a means for collecting vision data has many advantages, especially when dealing with a relatively constrained environment found with indoor applications. These environments have several factors that enable simplifications to vision systems to be made. The first is that the lighting can be controlled, or at least is known about and can be reliably predicted. This enables the easier use of active techniques. A second factor is the predominance of man-made objects which can be relatively easily described by geometric models, which means a wide range of computer vision techniques can be used. A third factor is the relatively short-range of the relevant objects in the environment, which enable triangulation techniques to be useful in assessing how far away objects are, and what their geometry is. The use of a model-based vision approach in conjunction with active stereo seems ideally suited to these conditions