A Real-Time Wall Detection Method for Indoor Environments

This paper presents an effective and real-time approach for detecting walls in indoor environment. This approach relies on the fact that the rear of the opaque walls is not visible. Thus, to detect the walls in an indoor environment a set of hypothetical walls, based on the ceiling edges or ground level edges, are considered; and their validity is checked using point cloud, generated by a sensor. A certainty factor is calculated for each detected wall, which is updated continuously based on the newly gathered sensory information. Furthermore, the certainty of the walls can be updated using other source of information for better and more reliable wall detection. The novelty of this approach is in its capability to handle environments, with texture-less walls, in real-time. The algorithm has been implemented in simulation, and tested in real environment and has shown effective, reliable and real-time performance