Abstract
In this paper a system will be presented that was developed for ESA for the support of planetary exploration. The system that is sent to the planetary surface consists of a rover and a lander. The lander contains a stereo head equipped with a pan-tilt mechanism. This vision system is used both for modeling of the terrain and for localization of the rover. Both tasks are necessary for the navigation of the rover. Due to the stress that occurs during the flight a recalibration of the stereo vision system is required once it is deployed on the planet. Due to practical limitations it is infeasible to use a known calibration pattern for this purpose and therefore a new calibration procedure had to be developed that can work on images of the planetary environment. This automatic procedure recovers the relative orientation of the cameras and the pan- and tilt-axis, besides the exterior orientation for all the images. The same images are subsequently used to recover the 3D structure of the terrain. For this purpose a dense stereo matching algorithm is used that – after rectification – computes a disparity map. Finally, all the disparity maps are merged into a single digital terrain model. In this paper a simple and elegant procedure is proposed that achieves that goal. The fact that the same images can be used for both calibration and 3D reconstruction is important since in general the communication bandwidth is very limited. In addition to the use for navigation and path planning, the 3D model of the terrain is also used for Virtual Reality simulation of the mission, in which case the model is texture mapped with the original images. The system has been implemented and the first tests on the ESA planetary terrain testbed were successful.
Abstract
Postdoctoral Fellow of the Fund for Scientific Research – Flanders (Belgium) (F.W.O. – Vlaanderen).
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Vergauwen, M., Pollefeys, M., Van Gool, L. (2001). A Stereo Vision System for Support of Planetary Surface Exploration. In: Schiele, B., Sagerer, G. (eds) Computer Vision Systems. ICVS 2001. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2095. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-48222-9_20
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-48222-9_20
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