Velocity measurement of intelligent wheelchair based on restoration of optical flow field

In this paper, the accuracy improvement of velocity measurement of intelligent wheelchair based on optical flow is studied. When wheelchair moves indoor, mechanical jittering occurs slightly, which has an impact on the accuracy of optical flow odometry. To solve the problem, a novel restoration method of optical flow field is proposed. Firstly, we select the starting and end points of optical flow vectors as the matched feature points, then solve the initial affine kinematic parameters using least square method. In the following, Kalman Filter (KF) is used to smooth the parameters with futile shake. In the end, optical flow field can be compensated to prepare for the follow-up optical flow odometry. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on velocity measurement of intelligent wheelchair.