Improved single-camera stereo system for mobile robotics

摘要

A single-camera stereo vision system offers a greatly simplified approach to image capture and analysis. In the original study by Lovegrove and Brame, they proposed a novel optical system that uses a single camera to capture two short, wide stereo images that can then be analyzed for real-time obstacle detection. In this paper, further analysis and refinement of the optical design results in two virtual cameras with perfectly parallel central axes. A new prototype camera design provides experimental verification of the analysis and also provides insight into practical construction. The experimental device showed that the virtual cameras' axes possessed a deviation from parallel of less than 12 minutes (or 0.2°). The calculation of distances to objects from the two overlapping images all showed errors smaller than the pixel resolution limitation. In addition, a barrel lens correction was used in processing the image to allow parallax distance determination in the whole horizontal view of the images.