Multi-Feature Fusion Based Outdoor Water Hazards Detection

Water hazards such as ponds usually threaten the unmanned ground vehicle autonomous off-road navigation. The water hazards detection is a great challenge when using the machine vision. The method of multi-feature fusion is applied here for this kind of detection. By using the color cameras, we extract the features of brightness and texture from the non-reflection regions. Further more, a new stereo vision based method is also proposed to get the height and the distance information of the reflection regions, and then the corresponding water regions can be acquired. Finally all the features are fused together and the accurate water regions from the images can be detected. The experimental results demonstrate the efficiency of this method.