Ground plane detection using visual and inertial data fusion

In mobile systems the position and attitude of the active vision system's cameras can be hard to determine. Inertial sensors coupled to the active vision system can provide valuable information, as happens with the vestibular system in human and other animals. In this article, we present our integrated inertial and vision systems. The active vision system has a set of stereo cameras capable of vergence, with a common baseline, pan and tilt, and an implemented process of visual fixation. An inertial system prototype, based on low-cost sensors, was built. The inertial sensor data is used to segment the ground plane in the images. For on-the-fly visualisation of the segmented images and the detected ground points a VRML viewer is used.