Monocular rear-view obstacle detection using residual flow

Abstract

We present a system for automatically detecting obstacles from a moving vehicle using a monocular wide angle camera. Our system was developed in the context of finding obstacles and particularly children when backing up. Camera viewpoint is transformed to a virtual bird-eye view. We developed a novel image registration algorithm to obtain ego-motion that in combination with variational dense optical flow outputs a residual motion map with respect to the ground. The residual motion map is used to identify and segment 3D and moving objects. Our main contribution is the feature-based image registration algorithm that is able to separate and obtain ground layer ego-motion accurately even in cases of ground covering only 20% of the image, outperforming RANSAC. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.