Robust real-time ground plane motion compensation from a moving vehicle

One method to detect obstacles from a vehicle moving on a planar road surfa ce is the analysis of motion-compensated difference images. In this contrib ution, a motion compensation algorithm is presented, which computes the req uired image-warping parameters from an estimate of the relative motion betw een camera and ground plane. The proposed algorithm estimates the warping p arameters from displacements at image corners and image edges. It exploits the estimated confidence of the displacements to cope robustly with outlier s. Knowledge about camera calibration, measuremts from odometry, and the pr evious estimate are used for motion prediction and to stabilize the estimat ion process when there is not enough information available in the measured image displacements. The motion compensation algorithm has been integrated with modules for obstacle detection and lane tracking. This system has been integrated in experimental vehicles and runs in real time with an overall cycle of 12.5 Hz on low-cost standard hardware.