Impulse noise removal of LRF for 3D map building using a hybrid median filter

In this paper, a single LRF has been used to produce a 3D map for the mobile robot navigation. The 2D laser scanners are used for mobile robots navigation, where the laser scanner is applied to detect a certain level of area by the straight beam. Therefore, it is limited to the usages of 2D obstacle detection and avoidance. In this research, it is designed to complement a mobile robot system to move up and down a single LRF along the yaw axis. During the up and down motion, the 2D data is stacked and manipulated to build a 3D map. Often a single LRF data is mixed with Gaussian and impulse noises. The impulse noises are removed out by the hybrid median filter designed in this research. The 2D data which are improved by deleting the impulse noises are layered to build the 3D map. To remove impulse noises while preserving the boundary is a main advantage of the hybrid median filter which has been used widely to improve the quality of images. The effectiveness of this hybrid median filter for rejecting the impulse noises has been verified through the real experiments. The performance of the hybrid median filter is evaluated in terms of PSNR (peak signal to noise ratio) and the processing time.