Autonomous stereo vision system for depth computation of moving object

Abstract

This work targets one real world application of stereo vision technology: the computation of the depth information of a moving object in a scene. It uses a stereo camera set that captures the stereoscopic view of the scene. Background subtraction algorithm is used to detect the moving object, supported by the recursive filter of first order as updating method. Mean filter is the pre-processing stage, combined with frame downscaling to reduce the background storage. After thresholding the background subtraction result, the binary image is sent to the software processing unit to compute the centroid of the moving area, and the measured disparity, estimate the disparity by Kalman algorithm, and finally calculate the depth from the estimated disparity. The implementation successfully achieves the objectives of resolution 720p, at 28.68 fps and maximum permissible depth error of ±4 cm (1.066 %) for a depth measuring range from 25 cm to 375 cm.