Obstacle detection based on motion constraint of virtual planes

We propose a robust method of detecting obstacles using a single camera mounted on a vehicle. In order to distinguish an obstacle from the ground plane, an effective criterion is to utilize motion parallax between them. We set two virtual planes corresponding to an obstacle and the ground plane respectively, track them simultaneously in the image without finding correspondences of feature points, and detect an obstacle by selecting the virtual plane corresponding to obstacles whose tracking result is more consistent with the motion of pixels than the one with respect to the ground plane. Employing image sequences captured at a high frame rate makes it possible to track virtual planes accurately and realize robust obstacle detection.