Space occupancy using multiple shadowimages

Addresses the problem of estimating 3D space occupancy using video imagery in the context of mobile robotics. A stationary robot observes a cluttered scene from a single viewpoint, and a second robot illuminates the scene from a sequence of directions thus producing a sequence of grey-level images. Differences of successive images are used to compute a sequence of shadowimages. The problem is to compute free space and occupied space from these shadowimages. Solutions to this problem are known for the special case of terrain scenes. The authors generalize these solutions to non-terrain scenes by making two key observations. First, there is a subset constraint on the shadowimages of a non-terrain scene, which allows the visible surfaces of a non-terrain scene to be recovered by a terrain-based technique. Second, the remaining regions of the shadowimages provide a conservative estimate of the occupied space hidden by these visible surfaces.

Authors

• Michael S. Langer
• Gregory Dudek
• Steven W. Zucker

Keywords

• Layout
• Orbital robotics
• Robot vision systems
• Cameras
• Surface reconstruction
• Light sources
• Master-slave
• Mobile robots
• Robotics and automation
• Binary search trees
• Space Occupancy
• Free Space
• Mobile Robot
• Visible Surface
• Gray-level Images
• Single Viewpoint
• Occupied Space
• Light Source
• Lattice Parameters
• Point Source
• Optical Axis
• Line Scan
• Depth Map
• Direct Source
• Surface Points
• Light Rays
• Laser Ranging
• Point Light Source