Shape recovery of collision zones for obstacle avoidance

Presents an approach to detect moving obstacles in order to define a collision zone around them. The approach uses a camera system to provide image sequences from which the dynamic aspect of the scene can be recovered. In fact, if the camera samples the observation space at some time intervals, a two-dimensional image sequence may be created, due to the relative motion. The analysis of these sequences can be useful to recovery information about the relative notion between a mobile vehicle and the navigation space. The appearance of an obstacle can be recovered using optical flow analysis. The authors compute optical flow maps to solve the problem of detecting discontinuities in the flow field in order to segment the image in different moving objects. An estimation of depth values for the segmented points is accomplished by means of optical flow and focus of expansion. Experimental results on image sequences of a real scene are presented