Active Stereo and Motion Vision for Vehicle Navigation
H. K. Nishihara, Richard Marks, J. Brian Burns, Stanley J. Rosenschein · 1998
Abstract : This report describes work accomplished by Teleos Research in support of DARPA's Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV) Program. The presentation focuses on making forward- looking projections about opportunities for visual sensing on unmanned military vehicles based on the experience of this research program. A case is made for deploying UGV's following a small system model. Trends in commodity processor technology enable this possibility. The relationship between system cost and operational conservatism, system size and fragility, and speed and effort reguired, all support a shift towards smaller, cheaper implementations. We believe that this development model will rapidly take hold over the coming years. This report also presents a brief review of stereo performance characteristics relevant to the UGV mobility application. Several new techniques for enhancing stereo performance, including soft surface detection and disparity gradient compensation, are described.