This paper investigates whether a stereo vision system based on points of interest is robust enough to detect obstacles for applications like a mobile robot in an industrial environment and for the visually impaired. Points of interest are extracted with a known method, called KLT. Two algorithms to solve the correspondence problem (Sum of Squared Difference and Variance Normalized Correlation) are used and evaluated as well as a combination of the two. An improvement is made if the two algorithms are combined. The tests show that stereo vision based on points of interest only can be used robustly for obstacle detection if there is enough texture on the obstacle. Otherwise too few points of interest on the object are detected and a reliable estimation of the distance to the object cannot be made.
Stereo vision for mobile robots