Stereo vision for terrain investigation

For man more than 90% of the information regarding the surrounding environment comes on the visual way. For an autonomous vehicle the vision is as important as sight is for man. The main problem in designing video systems is the huge amount of data to be processed and the complex algorithm required to extract information from the images. On this document will be described how the problems about data transfer speed, computational power and video signal processing had been solved to achieve the goal: a 3D vision system for autonomous vehicles. The system is using two USB web cams connected to a Windows running PC. On the PC a program was developed using LabVIEW is doing all the image acquisition, calibration processing and data extraction. Practically, the system is a low cost solution with relatively high vision accuracy.