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Active Vision Speed Estimation from Optical Flow

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Towards Autonomous Robotic Systems (TAROS 2013)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 8069))

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Abstract

In this research, we addressDiamantas, Sotirios Ch. Dasgupta, Prithviraj an important problem in mobile robotics - how to estimate the speed of a moving robot or vehicle using optical flow obtained from a series of images of the moving robot captured by a camera. Our method generalizes several restrictions and assumptions that have been used previously to solve this problem - we use an uncalibrated camera, we do not use any reference points on the ground or on the image, and we do not make any assumptions on the height of the moving target. The only known parameter is the camera distance from the ground. In our method we exploit the optical flow patterns generated by varying the camera focal length in order to pinpoint the principal point on the image plane and project the camera height on the image plane. This height is then used to estimate the speed of the target.

This research has been supported by the U.S. Office of Naval Research grant no. N000140911174 as part of the COMRADES project.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The non-parametric method we have developed for outlier removal aims at avoiding the known risks entailing the use of parametric methods, such as RANSAC.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. C-MANTIC Lab, Department of Computer Science, University of Nebraska, Omaha, Omaha, NE, 68182, USA

    Sotirios Ch. Diamantas & Prithviraj Dasgupta

Authors
  1. Sotirios Ch. Diamantas
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  2. Prithviraj Dasgupta
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Sotirios Ch. Diamantas .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom

    Ashutosh Natraj

  2. Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom

    Stephen Cameron

  3. University of Bristol and the West of En, Bristol, United Kingdom

    Chris Melhuish

  4. Imperial College London Department of Electrical and Electronic, London, United Kingdom

    Mark Witkowski

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Diamantas, S.C., Dasgupta, P. (2014). Active Vision Speed Estimation from Optical Flow. In: Natraj, A., Cameron, S., Melhuish, C., Witkowski, M. (eds) Towards Autonomous Robotic Systems. TAROS 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8069. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-43645-5_18

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-43645-5_18

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-662-43644-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-662-43645-5

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