Shadow casting stereo imaging for high accurate and robust stereo processing of natural environment

Generally, the 3d surface measurement is the most important process for the sample acquisition task by planetary exploration rover. In this paper, we propose new stereo measurement method by using the shadow projected into stereo images. The projected shadow limits the search area of stereo matching, and is providing robustness on the feature point matching process. As a result, the method is highly performed on the accuracy and the calculation speed. Finally the evaluation conducted by experimental results are shown, and the validity is indicated.