Ground plane segmentation for mobile robot visual navigation

We describe a method of mobile robot monocular visual navigation, which uses multiple visual cues to detect and segment the ground plane in the robot’s field of view. Corner points are tracked through an image sequence and grouped into coplanar regions using a method which we call an H-based tracker. The H-based tracker employs planar homographys and is initialised by 5-point planar projective invariants. This allows us to detect ground plane patches and the colour within such patches is subsequently modelled. These patches are grown by colour classification to give a ground plane segmentation, which is then used as an input to a new variant of the artificial potential field algorithm.