Abdelaziz Bensrhair

Accurate scale estimation based on unsynchronized camera network

In this paper we present an unsynchronized camera network able to estimate the motion and the structure with accurate absolute scale. The proposed algorithm requires at least three frames: two frames from one camera and a frame from a neighbouring camera. The relative camera poses are estimated with classical Structure-from-Motion and the absolute scales between views are computed by assuming straight trajectories between consecutive views of one camera. We propose a final optimisation step to refine only the scale and the 3D points. Our method is evaluated in real conditions on the KITTI dataset. We show quantitative evaluation through comparisons against GPS/INS ground truth.

New Robust Obstacle Detection System Using Color Stereo Vision

Intelligent transportation systems (ITS) are divided into intelligent infrastructure systems and intelligent vehicle systems. Intelligent vehicle systems are typically classified in three categories, namely 1) Collision Avoidance Systems; 2) Driver Assistance Systems and 3) Collision Notification Systems. Obstacle detection is one of crucial tasks for Collision Avoidance Systems and Driver Assistance Systems. Obstacle detection systems use vehiclemounted sensors to detect obstuctions, such as other vehicles, bicyclists, pedestrians, road debris, or animals, in a vehicle’s path and alert the driver. Obstacle detection systems are proposed to help drivers see farther and therefore have more time to react to road hazards. These systems also help drivers to get a large visibility area when the visibility conditions is reduced such as night, fog, snow, rain, ... Obstacle detection systems process data acquired from one or several sensors: radar Kruse et al. (2004), lidar Gao & Coifman (2006), monocular vision Lombardi & Zavidovique (2004), stereo vision Franke (2000) Bensrhair et al. (2002) Cabani et al. (2006b) Kogler et al. (2006) Woodfill et al. (2007), vision fused with active sensors Gern et al. (2000) Steux et al. (2002) Mobus & Kolbe (2004)Zhu et al. (2006) Alessandretti et al. (2007)Cheng et al. (2007). It is clear now that most obstacle detection systems cannot work without vision. Typically, vision-based systems consist of cameras that provide gray level images. When visibility conditions are reduced (night, fog, twilight, tunnel, snow, rain), vision systems are almost blind. Obstacle detection systems are less robust and reliable. To deal with the problem of reduced visibility conditions, infrared or color cameras can be used. Thermal imaging cameras are initially used by militaries. Over the last few years, these systems became accessible to the commercial market, and can be found in select 2006 BMW cars. For example, vehicle headlight systems provide between 75 to 140 meters of moderate illumination; at 90 K meters per hour this means less than 4 seconds to react to hazards. When with PathFindIR PathFindIR (n.d.) (a commercial system), a driver can have more than 15 seconds. Other systems still in the research stage assist drivers to detect pedestrians Xu & Fujimura (2002) Broggi et al. (2004) Bertozzi et al. (2007). Color is appropriate to various visibility conditions and various environments. In Betke et al. (2000) and Betke & Nguyen (1998), Betke et al. have demonstrated that the tracking of

Obstacle detection using unsynchronized multi-camera network

In this paper, we present a simple algorithm for obstacle detection, road surface extraction and tracking using Kalman filter and u-v-disparity images. The proposed approach is based on the use of an unsynchronized camera system and the use of sparse maps instead of dense ones due to the unsynchronization constraint. First, a sparse disparity map is computed from two images then the u-v-disparity images are built from it. Road and obstacles are extracted using a modified Hough transform. Our experimental results on real images show the efficiency of our algorithm.