Detection of Difference on a Road by Geometric Analysis of a Scene

In this paper, to assist the visual function of elderly people, we propose a method of recognizing the difference in level on a road. The point of this paper is in the detection of the motion parallax caused by the height of the difference. Some researches have been performed for the recognition of road level difference. The proposed method differs from those researches which use multiple cameras and landmarks for the detection. We employ only a single camera for this purpose. It pays attention to the point of the road level difference. A nearby point and a distant point seem to move at a different speed depending on an observer´s motion. In the proposed technique, the presence of the road level difference is recognized by calculating the distances between the camera and the specified points on the road. The technique was examined its performance by experiments and promising results were obtained