A Safe Fault Tolerant Multi-view Approach for Vision-Based Protective Devices

We present a new approach that realizes an image-based fault tolerant distance computation for a multi-view camera system which conservatively approximates the shortest distance between unknown objects and 3D volumes. Our method addresses the industrial application of vision-based protective devices which are used to detect intrusions of humans into areas of dangerous machinery, in order to prevent injuries. This requires hardware redundancy for compensation of hardware failures without loss of functionality and safety. By taking sensor failures during the fusion process of distances from different cameras into account, this is realized implicitly, with the benefit of no additional hardware cost. In particular we employ multiple camera perspectives for safe and non-conservative occlusion handling of obstacles and formulate general system assumptions which are also appropriate for other applications like multi-view reconstruction methods.