Stereo Vision Depth Estimation Methods for Robotic Applications

Abstract

Vision is undoubtedly the most important sense for humans. Apart from many other low and higher level perception tasks, stereo vision has been proven to provide remarkable results when it comes to depth estimation. As a result, stereo vision is a rather popular and prosperous subject among the computer and machine vision research community. Moreover, the evolution of robotics and the demand for vision-based autonomous behaviors has posed new challenges that need to be tackled. Autonomous operation of robots in real working environments, given limited resources requires effective stereo vision algorithms. This chapter presents suitable depth estimation methods based on stereo vision and discusses potential robotic applications.