Improved image dominant plane extraction for robot navigation

Abstract

The dominant plane is a planar area that occupies the largest portion of an image captured by a camera. In this paper, we present an improved method for extracting the dominant plane from optical flow and use the resultant image to steer a mobile robot along a corridor route. In this route the dominant plane is the free space where the robot can navigate without colliding with the obstacles cluttering the environment. Our experimental results illustrate significant performance improvements over those published in previous works. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.