Robust ground plane detection for obstacle avoidance of mobile robots using a monocular camera

This paper presents a vision-based obstacle avoidance design using a monocular camera onboard a mobile robot. An image processing procedure is developed to estimate distances between the robot and obstacles based-on inverse perspective transformation (IPT) in image plane. A robust image processing solution is proposed to detect and segment navigatable ground plane area within the camera view. The proposed method integrate robust feature matching with adaptive color segmentation for plane estimation and tracking to cope with variations in illumination and camera view. After IPT and ground region segmentation, a result similar to the occupancy grid map is obtained for mobile robot obstacle avoidance and navigation. Practical experimental results of a wheeled mobile robot show that the proposed imaging system successfully estimates distance of objects and avoid obstacles in an indoor environment.