3D shape measurement of a large cloth close to a fisheye stereo

The 3D shape measurement of a cloth is indispensable for a robot to autonomously handle the cloth. When a humanoid hangs a large cloth using its arm, the cloth is very close to its head and extends across a very wide field of view. A normal stereo camera mounted on the humanoid robot´s head cannot capture the whole shape; however, a fisheye stereo can. Because the cloth is very close to the stereo cameras, the left and right images appear to be very different, which creates a correspondence problem. To resolve this problem, a novel approach that predicts the apparent shape on the left image from the apparent shape on the right image by utilizing the characteristics of hanging clothes is proposed. The results from an evaluation experiment that used an artificial target and actual cloth hung by a humanoid are introduced.