Exploiting Vertical Lines in Vision-Based Navigation for Mobile Robot Platforms

Vertical line-like structures are abundant in man-made environments, such as the vertical edges of buildings in an outdoor environment and door frames and vertical edges of furniture in an indoors environment. These ubiquitous line or line-like structures may provide useful information for mobile robot navigation. In this paper, we propose an approach to estimating the camera orientation based on detected vertical lines. Further we use the estimated camera orientation in one key problem of mobile robot navigation: ground/obstacle detection. Our method is theoretically well-grounded and yet simple and practical in implementation.