Determining the absolute orientation in a corridor using projective geometry and active vision

The capability of a mobile robot to determine its position in the environment (self-localization) is a prerequisite for achieving autonomous navigation. An approach is proposed for determining the absolute orientation of an autonomous robot in a system of corridors, based on the projective geometry and active computer vision. In the proposed approach, the common direction of longitudinal corridor edges is inferred by detecting the vanishing point of the corresponding straight line segments in the image. It is assumed that the knowledge about the vertical direction in the scene is available, so that the image coordinates of these vanishing points are considerably constrained. However, longitudinal corridor edges are not visible in images acquired for many viewing directions, so that the processing in a localization procedure has to be performed on a sequence of images acquired from the given position, for regularly arranged orientations of the camera. Extensive experimentation was performed on real scenes and the obtained results are provided.