Motion compensation for obstacle detection based on homography and odometric data with virtual camera perspectives

In this paper we present a method to compensate the image motion of a monocular camera on a moving vehicle in order to detect obstacles. Due to the camera motion, the road surface induces a characteristic image motion between two camera shots. The motion of the camera is determined by the use of odometric data received from the CAN-bus, and the position and orientation of the road is continuously estimated with camera self-calibration. This all leads to a motion field which is predicted based on homography. To prevent the drawbacks of the real camera perspective, different virtual camera perspectives are presented in combination with motion compensation. Possible virtual perspectives are the bird´s eye view and image rectification. In addition, a non-linear camera model is used which does not limit the range of obstacle detection to a certain distance and efficiently uses the available image information.