INTEGRATING EDGE-BASED STEREO AND STRUCTURED LIGHT FOR ROBUST SURFACE RECONSTRUCTION

Abstract

We present a trinocular stereo vision technique that can be used to build a fast, robust 3-D description of the environment. The proposed technique merges a range image obtained by edge-based stereo with another range image obtained using structured light. In edgebased stereo technique, we utilize the geometrical constraints of the trinocular vision system and consider the uncertainty of image measurements. The edgebased stereo builds a faithful reconstruction of the fixed edges of the surface while the structured light enables us to obtain a 3-D description for smooth surface regions. Integrating these two types of range images improves the accuracy of the reconstructed surfaces and makes it applicable to different types of surfaces. The technique has been successfully applied to several indoor scenes. The reliability and speed of the proposed system make it particularly suitable for real-time applications such as robots and automatic vehicle navigation. 1 Introduction During the l...