Accessible section detection for visual guidance

We address the problem of determining the accessible section in front of a walking person. In our definition, the accessible section is the spatial region that is not blocked by obstacles. For this purpose, we use gradients to calculate surface normals on the depth map and subsequently determine the accessible section using these surface normals. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach on a novel, challenging dataset. The dataset consists of urban outdoor and indoor scenes that were recorded with a handheld stereo camera.