Mobile Robotic Navigation Using Ground Plane Detection

Motivation:

The idea behind this research is that when it comes to vision-based mobile robotic navigation, one of the most important features to locate in a scene is the ground plane. Once this plane is found, all other objects in a scene can be segmented out. To detect the ground plane, we propose a homography based approach that uses a modified Expectation Maximization (MEM) algorithm.
We tested our approach by creating a simple target following algorithm. This algorithm used our MEM approach to detect the ground plane in the scene. Once the ground plane was found, the rest of the feature points we assumed to belong to the target that we are suppose to follow. Results can be seen in the following sequences:
Sequence 6