An omnidirectional vision system that finds and tracks color edges and blobs

Abstract

We describe the omnidirectional local vision system developed for the FU-Fighters, a RoboCup F180 league soccer team. A small video camera mounted vertically on top of the robots looks at a concave parabolic mirror placed above the camera that reflects the field around. The image is sent via a radio link to an external PC for processing. Our computer vision system can find the ball and detect other robots as obstacles. The walls of the field are also recognized and are used to determine the initial position of the robot. In order to be able to process the video stream at full frame rate the movement of all objects is tracked, including the walls of the field. The key idea of our approach is to predict the location of color edges in the next frame and to search for such color transitions along lines that are perpendicular to the edge. © 2002 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.