Navigation Using Optical Flow Fields: An Application of Dominant Plane Detection

Video sequences capturing real scenes may be interpreted with respect to a dominant plane which is a planar surface covering ‘a majority’ of pixels in an image of a video sequence, i.e. that planar surface which is represented in the image by a maximum number of pixels. In this paper, we propose an algorithm for the detection of dominant planes from optical flow fields caused by camera motion in a static scene. We, in particular, intend to adopt this algorithm as a module for obstacle detection in vision-based navigation of autonomous robots. 1 Interdisciplinary Graduate School of Science and Engineering, Tokyo Institute of Technology 2 Media Technology Division, IMIT, Chiba University 3 Software Research Division, National Institute of Informatics 4 Center for Image Technology and Robotics Tamaki Campus, The University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand. [email protected] You are granted permission for the non-commercial reproduction, distribution, display, and performance of this technical report in any format, BUT this permission is only for a period of 45 (forty-five) days from the most recent time that you verified that this technical report is still available from the CITR Tamaki web site under terms that include this permission. All other rights are reserved by the author(s). Navigation Using Optical Flow Fields: An Application of Dominant Plane Detection Kazuhiko Kawamoto, Daisuke Yamada, Atsushi Imiya and Reinhard Klette Interdisciplinary Graduate School of Science and Engineering, Tokyo Institute of Technology Media Technology Division, IMIT, Chiba University Software Research Division, National Institute of Informatics CITR, University of Auckland E-mail: [email protected]