OMNIDIRECTIONAL STEREO

Omni-directional views of an indoor environment at different locations are integrated into a global map. A single camera swiveling about the vertical axis takes consecutive images and arranges them into a panoramic representation, which provides rich information around the observation point; a precise omni-directional view of the environment and coarse ranges to objects in it. Using the coarse map, the system autonomously plans consecutive observations at the intersections of lines connecting object points, where the directions of the imaging are estimated easily and precisely. From two panoramic views at the two planned locations, a modified binocular stereo method yields a more precise, but with direction-dependent uncertainties, local map. New observation points are selected to decrease the uncertainty, and another local map is yielded, which is then integrated into a more reliable global representation of the world with the adjacent local maps.