Three Dimensional Computer Vision for Micro Air Vehicles

Results are described of an ongoing project whose goal is to provide advanced Computer Vision for small low flying autonomous aircraft. The work consists of two parts; range-based vision for object recognition and pose estimation, and monocular vision for navigation and collision avoidance. A wide variety of range imaging methods were considered for the former, and it was found that a promising approach is multi-ocular stereo with a pseudorandom texture projected with a xenon flash. This provides high range resolution despite motion, and can be small and light. The resulting range images, taken at a few meters range, would support the use of Tripod Operators, an efficient and general method for recognizing and localizing surface shapes in 6 DOF. This would provide the ability to recognize immediately upon encounter many kinds of targets. The monocular navigation system is based on finding corresponding features in successive images, and deducing from these the relative pose of the aircraft. Two methods are under development, based on horizon registration and point correspondences, respectively. The first can serve as a preprocessor for the second. This approach aims to continuously and accurately estimate the net motion of the vehicle.