Navigation Using Optical Flow Fields: An Application of Dominant Plane Detection

Abstract

Video sequences capturing real scenes may be interpreted with respect to a dominant plane which is a planar surface covering 'a majority' of pixels in an image of a video sequence, i.e. that planar surface which is represented in the image by a maximum number of pixels. In this paper, we propose an algorithm for the detection of dominant planes from optical flow fields caused by camera motion in a static scene. We, in particular, intend to adopt this algorithm as a module for obstacle detection in vision-based navigation of autonomous robots.