Obstacle detection by means of stereo feature matching

Automated obstacle detection is required in a number of applications. It is a challenging task because there is no prior knowledge about the appearance of ground, or the locations and appearance of obstacles in the scene. In this paper, an obstacle detection system based on matching the color edge features in stereo images is presented. The paper also presents an enhanced adaptive local-cross based stereo matching method used in the system. The system has been extensively evaluated. The result of evaluation allows the usage of system for automatic detection of moderately sized obstacles within a distance range of 2-15 meters with sufficient accuracy.