Appearance contrast for fast, robust trail-following

13 years 11 months ago

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— We describe a framework for ﬁnding and tracking “trails” for autonomous outdoor robot navigation. Through a combination of visual cues and ladar-derived structural information, the algorithm is able to follow paths which pass through multiple zones of terrain smoothness, border vegetation, tread material, and illumination conditions. Our shape-based visual trail tracker assumes that the approaching trail region is approximately triangular under perspective. It generates region hypotheses from a learned distribution of expected trail width and curvature variation, and scores them using a robust measure of color and brightness contrast with ﬂanking regions. The structural component analogously rewards hypotheses which correspond to empty or low-density regions in a groundstrike-ﬁltered ladar obstacle map. Our system’s performance is analyzed on several long sequences with diverse appearance and structural characteristics. Ground-truth segmentations are used to quantify pe...

Christopher Rasmussen, Yan Lu, Mehmet Kocamaz

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