Analysis of omni-directional views at different location

Omni-directional views of environment are analyzed to build a world model of an autonomous mobile robot. A panoramic view is yielded by arranging the vertical line at the center of each image taken by a camera attached on the robot. The panoramic view is featured by the cylindrical projection of a 3D line onto a sinusoidal curve. The following three issues are discussed: (1) projection of 3-D space onto the panoramic view; (2) epipolar curves for stereo matching; and (3) optical flow. A method for finding the 3D structure of an environment is proposed.<
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