This paper presents an optical flow based novel technique to perceive the instant motion velocity of mobile robots. The primary focus of this study is to determine the robot’s ego-motion using displacement field in temporally consecutive image pairs. In contrast to most previous approaches for estimating velocity, we employ a polynomial expansion based dense optical flow approach and propose a quadratic model based RANSAC refinement of flow fields to render our method more robust with respect to noise and outliers. Accordingly, techniques for geometrical transformation and interpretation of the inter-frame motion are presented. Advantages of our proposal are validated by real experimental results conducted on Pioneer robot.

Date Published: 14 February 2015
PDF: 5 pages
Proc. SPIE 9445, Seventh International Conference on Machine Vision (ICMV 2014), 94451Q (14 February 2015); doi: 10.1117/12.2180892

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 9445:
Seventh International Conference on Machine Vision (ICMV 2014)
Antanas Verikas; Branislav Vuksanovic; Petia Radeva; Jianhong Zhou, Editor(s)