Absolute Velocity Estimation of Surrounding Objects for Mobile Robots using Vacant Area on Nearby Ground Surface

Abstract

We propose an absolute velocity estimation method of surrounding objects using stereo high-speed vision. Surrounding objects are detected and tracked at high-speed by stereo inverse perspective mapping (stereo IPM), meanwhile relative positions are estimated. Relative positions at two adjacent frames are transformed to the same coordinates by using ego-motion information to compute absolute velocity. Ego-motion is estimated by computing relative motion against the ground surface using vacant area detected by stereo IPM to achieve robust and accurate estimation. We demonstrated the proposed method greatly improved the accuracy of absolute velocity estimation through experiments in a vehicle scenario.