High-Speed Feature Extraction in Sensor Coordinates for Laser Rangefinders

摘要

The main contributions of this paper are two algorithms for extracting lines and corners present in the environment from information gathered by a laser rangefinder. The laser range scan is processed in its natural coordinates, range and bearing, to compute a parameter that is invariant to the position and orientation of straight lines present. An algorithm to extract the slopes of these lines is also presented. Log-Hough transform, that only explores a small region of the Hough space identified by the slopes computed, is then used to find the equations of the lines. An additional computation is used to identify consecutive short line segments that are perpendicular to each other in order to extract the corners present. The proposed method carries out all computations in the sensor coordinate frame yielding a fast and robust algorithm for feature extraction from laser range scans. Practical examples are presented to demonstrate the efficacy of the algorithm. An implementation of the simultaneous localisation and mapping that does not use any odometry is also provided to illustrate the use of the features extracted by the algorithm in robot navigation. 1