Environmental map generation and egomotion estimation in a dynamic environment for an omnidirectional image sensor

Abstract

Generation of a stationary environmental map is one of the important tasks for vision based robot navigation. Observational errors in the generated environmental map accumulate in long movements of the robot. To generate a large environmental map, it is desirable not to assume known robot motion. In this paper, under the assumption of unknown translational motions of the robot, we propose a method to generate a stationary environmental map, and estimate the egomotion of a robot in a dynamic environment by using an omnidirectional image sensor. Since both robot and objects move in the environment, the stationary map generation and the robot egomotion estimation by using a single camera are difficult because of correspondence ambiguity caused by occlusion. The proposed method can detect a moving object and find occlusion and mismatching by evaluating the estimation error of each object location.