Ground Plane Detection Using an RGB-D Sensor

Abstract

Ground plane detection is essential for successful navigation of vision based mobile robots. We introduce a very simple but robust ground plane detection method based on depth information obtained using an RGB-Depth sensor. We present two different variations of the method: the simplest one is robust in setups where the sensor pitch an-gle is fixed and has no roll, whereas the second one can handle changes in pitch and roll angles. Our comparisons show that our approach per-forms better than the vertical disparity approach. It produces accurate ground plane-obstacle segmentations for difficult scenes which include many obstacles, different floor surfaces, stairs, and narrow corridors.