Evaluation of a real-time kinetic depth system

We describe a robot vision system which produces a depth map in real time by means of motion parallax or kinetic depth. A video camera is held by a robot which moves so that a given point in space is kept fixated on the centre of the camera's imaging surface. The optical flow is calculated in a Datacube MaxVideo system and a full-frame depth map is produced 12.5 times per second. Calculated depths show an average 10% discrepancy with measured depths over 7 nonconsecutive images. sponding to the direction of the target point which are closer to the robot than the target point would indicate the presence of an obstacle.