• Journal of Mechanical Science and Technology
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• v.17 no.10
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• pp.1411-1422
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• 2003

The detection of free spaces between obstacles in a scene is a prerequisite for navigation of a mobile robot. Especially for stereo vision-based navigation, the problem of correspondence between two images is well known to be of crucial importance. This paper describes multi-range approach of area-based stereo matching for grid mapping and visual navigation in uncertain environment. Camera calibration parameters are optimized by evolutionary algorithm for successful stereo matching. To obtain reliable disparity information from both images, stereo images are to be decomposed into three pairs of images with different resolution based on measurement of disparities. The advantage of multi-range approach is that we can get more reliable disparity in each defined range because disparities from high resolution image are used for farther object a while disparities from low resolution images are used for close objects. The reliable disparity map is combined through post-processing for rejecting incorrect disparity information from each disparity map. The real distance from a disparity image is converted into an occupancy grid representation of a mobile robot. We have investigated the possibility of multi-range approach for the detection of obstacles and visual mapping through various experiments.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.16 no.3
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• pp.407-415
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• 2012

In this paper, we propose a new stereo matching algorithm by using color information especially for stereo images containing human beings in the applications such as tele-presence system. In the proposed algorithm, we first remove the background regions by using a threshold value for stereo images obtained by stereo camera and then find an initial disparity map and segment a given image into R, G, B and white color components. We also obtain edges in the segmented image and estimate the disparity from the extract boundary regions. Finally, we generate the final disparity map by properly combining the disparity map of each color component. Experiment results show better performance compared with the window based method and the dynamic programing method especially for stereo images with human being.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Intelligent Systems
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• v.25 no.5
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• pp.502-508
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• 2015

Stereo images have an advantage of calculating depth(distance) values which can not analyze from 2-D images. However, depth information obtained by stereo images has due to following reasons: it can be obtained by computation process; mismatching occurs when stereo matching is processing in occlusion which has an effect on accuracy of calculating depth information. Also, if global method is used for stereo matching, it needs a lot of computation. Therefore, this paper proposes the method obtaining disparity map which can reduce computation time and has higher accuracy than established method. Edge extraction which is image segmentation based on feature is used for improving accuracy and reducing computation time. Color K-Means method which is image segmentation based on color estimates correlation of objects in an image. And it extracts region of interest for applying Loopy Belief Propagation(LBP). For this, disparity map can be compensated by considering correlation of objects in the image. And it can reduce computation time because of calculating region of interest not all pixels. As a result, disparity map has more accurate and the proposed method reduces computation time.

• Proceedings of the Korean Information Science Society Conference
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• 2005.07b
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• pp.805-807
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• 2005

본 논문에서는 동적 계획법(dynamic programming)과 이미지 세그먼트(segment)를 이용한 새로운 스테레오 정합(stereo matching)기법을 제안한다. 일반적으로 동적 계획법(dynamic programming)은 빠르면서도 비교적 정확하고, 조밀(dense)한 disparity map을 얻을 수 있다. 그러나 경계(boundary)근처의 폐색지역(occlusion region)이나, 텍스쳐가 적은 모호한 영역에서는 잘못된 결과를 유도할 수 있다. 본 논문에서는 이러한 문제점들을 해결하기 위해 먼저 이미지를 아주 작은 영역으로 분할(over-segmentation)하고, 이런 작은 영역들이 비슷한 disparity를 가질 것이라고 가정한다. 다음으로 동적 계획법(dynamic programming)을 통해 정합을 수행한다. 여기서 계산비용(cost)은 기존의 정합윈도우 안에서 세그먼트 영역을 적용한 새로운 비용함수를 사용하며, 이 새로운 비용함수를 통해 정확도를 높인다. 마지막으로 동적 계획법을 통하여 얻어진 조밀한 disparity map을 세그먼트 영역들의 시각특성(visibility)과 유사도(similarity)를 이용하여 에러를 찾아내고, 세그먼트 정합을 통해 수정함으로 정확한 disparity map을 찾아낸다.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.39 no.2
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• pp.107-115
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• 2002

In this paper, we describe a novel method to generate an intermediate scene using BDM (Bidirectional Disparity Morphing) from the parallel stereopair. Because an image is composed of several layers and each layer has a similar disparity, it is available to use the block based disparity estimation. In order to prevent the false correspondence, however, we closely investigate the corresponding block as we adaptively vary the block size according to the estimation error. Therefore, we can detect the occlusion because of larger estimation error of the occluded region. We define three occluding patterns, which ate derived from the peculiar property of the disparity map, in order to smooth the computed disparity map. The filtered disparity map using these patterns presents that the false disparities ate well corrected and the boundary between foreground and background becomes sharper. As a result, we can improve the quality of the intermediate scenes.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.21 no.10
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• pp.965-971
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• 2015

This paper suggests a feature point-based Iterative Closest Point (ICP) algorithm to compensate for the disparity error in building a two-dimensional map. The ICP algorithm is a typical algorithm for matching a common object in two different images. In the process of building a two-dimensional map using the laser scanner data, warping and distortions exist in the map because of the disparity between the two sensor values. The ICP algorithm has been utilized to reduce the disparity error in matching the scanned line data. For this matching process in the conventional ICP algorithm, pre-known reference data are required. Since the proposed algorithm extracts characteristic points from laser-scanned data, reference data are not required for the matching. The laser scanner starts from the right side of the mobile robot and ends at the left side, which causes disparity in the scanned line data. By finding the matching points between two consecutive frame images, the motion vector of the mobile robot can be obtained. Therefore, the disparity error can be minimized by compensating for the motion vector caused by the mobile robot motion. The validity of the proposed algorithm has been verified by comparing the proposed algorithm in terms of map-building accuracy to conventional ICP algorithm real experiments.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.13 no.6
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• pp.915-929
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• 2008

In this paper, we propose an algorithm for pixel-based disparity estimation with reliability in the multi-view image. The proposed method estimates an initial disparity map using edge information of an image, and the initial disparity map is used for reducing the search range to estimate the disparity efficiently. Furthermore, disparity-mismatch on object boundaries and textureless-regions get reduced by adaptive block size. We generated intermediate-view images to evaluate the estimated disparity. Test results show that the proposed algorithm obtained $0.1{\sim}1.2dB$ enhanced PSNR(peak signal to noise ratio) compared to conventional block-based and pixel-based disparity estimation methods.

• Proceedings of the Korea Multimedia Society Conference
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• 2003.11a
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• pp.171-174
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• 2003

인간 시각이 감지하는 영상정보는 깊이정보가 있는 3차원형태의 정보이다. 이러한 영상정보를 획득하기 위해 2차원의 스테레오영상으로부터 3차원정보를 추출하는 방법이 연구되어왔다. 본 논문에서는 웨이블릿(wavelet) 영역에서의 영역기반 스테레오 매칭(stereo matching)을 통하여 3차원정보를 추출하고 복원하는 것을 제안한다.

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• 2006.06a
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• pp.317-318
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• 2006

There are lot of noises and errors in depth map image which is gotten by using a stereo camera. These errors are caused by mismatching of the corresponding points which occur in texture-less region of input images of stereo camera or occlusions. In this paper, we use a method which is able to get rid of the noises through post processing and reduce the errors of disparity values which are caused by the mismatching in the texture-less region of input images through the correlation between the depth map images and the input images. Then we propose a novel method which segments the object by using the improved disparity map images and projections.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Precision Engineering
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• v.19 no.5
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• pp.36-42
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• 2002

This paper presents the way of building an occupancy grid map which a mobile robot needs to autonomously navigate in the unknown environment. A disparity map resulting from stereo matching can be converted into the 2D distance information. If the stereo matching has some errors, however, the subsequent map becomes unreliable. In this paper, a new morphological filter is proposed to reject 'spikes' of the disparity map due to stereo mismatch by considering the fact that these spikes occur locally. The new method has advantages that it is simpler and more easily realized than existing similar algorithms. Several occupancy grid maps based on stereo vision using the proposed algorithm have been built and compared with the actual distance information to verify the validity of the proposed method.