Qing Lin, Hernsoo Hahn, Youngjoon Han
(Dept. of Electronic Engineering, Soongsil University, Seoul 156-743, Korea)
Abstract：This paper presents a travel-aid system for sight-impaired pedestrians in outdoor environment. Unlike many existing travel-aid systems that rely on stereo-vision, the proposed system aims to detect generic obstacles in a cluttered road environment by using just the single camera attached to user’s body. To achieve this goal, the original image is re-sampled and mapped to a bird-eye view virtual plane, on which background edges are sub-sampled while obstacle edges are oversampled. Morphology filters with connected component analysis are used to enhance obstacle edges as edge-blobs with larger size, whereas sparse edges from background are filtered out. Based on the identified obstacles, safe walking areas are estimated by calculating a polar edge histogram. The algorithm is tested in different sidewalk scenes with complex pavements, and its efficiency has been confirmed.
Key words：travel-aids; monocular vision; bird-eye view re-sampling; polar edge histogram
CLD number： TP391.41 Document code： A
Article ID： 1674-8042(2012)03-0219-05 doi： 10.3969/j.issn.1674-8042.2012.03.004
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