Snowcat Track Detection in Snowy Environments

Abstract

This paper describes the image processing techniques designed to localize tracks of snowcats for the Italian mission in Antarctica within the ENEA R.A.S. (Surface Antarctic Robot) project for the autonomous driving of intelligent snowcats. The final goal is to enable snowcats to automatically follow preceding ones. A camera is used to acquire images of the scene in realtime; the image sequence is analyzed by a computer vision system which identifies the tracks and produces a high level description of the scene. This data is forwarded to a further software module in charge of the control of the snowcat movement. A further optional representation, in which markers highlighting the tracks are superimposed onto the acquired image, is transmitted to a human supervisor located off-board. 1