Development of an active ranging system based on structured light image for mobile robot application

Abstract

This paper presents an active ranging system that is based on a laser structured-light image and is robust against environment illumination noise. Structured-light image processing is computationally more efficient than conventional stereo image processing since the burdensome correspondence problem is avoidable. In order to achieve robustness against illumination noise, we propose an efficient image processing algorithm, i.e., integration of sequential time-difference images with structured-light modulation. The proposed algorithm involves only elementary operations such as integer subtraction and addition and is appropriate for hardware implementation. For this algorithm, a specialized FPGA image processor is developed. A distance equation and sensitivity analysis are also presented. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.