Multiresolution Stereo Vision System
for Mobile Robots

Luca Iocchi

Dipartimento di Informatica e Sistemistica
Università di Roma "La Sapienza", Italy.

AI Center - SRI International


1. Introduction

Stereoscopy is a technique for infering the 3D position of objects from two or more simultaneously view of the scene.

Why using stereo vision for mobile robots?

We are describing a multiresolution stereoscopic vision system for a Pioneer mobile robot, by using low-cost STH-V1 Integrated Stereo Head and the SRI's stereo algorithm running on a conventional PC architecture.

The objective of this work is to implement a stereo vision system and to integrate the range information in the Local Perceptual Space of the robot (in Saphira).



Reconstruction of the world seen through stereo cameras can be divided in two steps:

  1. Correspondence problem. For every point in one image find out the correspondent point on the other and compute the disparity of these points.
  2. Triangulation. Given the disparity map, the focal distance of the two cameras and the geometry of the stereo setting (relative position and orientation of the cameras) compute the (X,Y,Z) coordinates of all points in the images.

The design and the implementation of a stereo vision system must take into account two factors:

Therefore Camera Calibration is a central issue for a stereo vision system. In fact calibration of a stereo camera is the task of relating the ideal pinhole model of the camera with an actual device (internal calibration) and retrieving the relative position and orientation of the cameras (external calibration).

1.1 Example

In this example we put the camera to see an object in front of a wall. We simply apply the stereo algorithm for computing the disparity map (actually a part of the external calibration [Yoff] was done before).

The following tables displayed the results of disparity and range computation in the normal case and when lens distortion has been removed and a multiresolution stereo technique has been applied.

Calibration OFF
Calibration ON


Calibration OFF
Calibration ON

In fact, calibration is needed in order to remove the distortion caused by the lenses that produces a curvature in the disparity line in the background (that should be straight as all the points in the wall are at the same distance from the cameras). While a multiresolution technique is applied for increasing the depth field of view of the camera.


2. Multiresolution Stereo

Multiresolution stereo is applied in order to improve range results for close objects.

Multiresolution is often used for improving performance of the matching algorithm by first looking in the low resolution pair of image for correspondences and then refine by a local search in a high resolution pair.
But this method requires a special matching algorithm.

Here we propose a slightly different multiresolution technique that applies the same matching algorithm to three different pair of images with resolution 320x60, 160x60 and 80x60, and then combines the disparity results.
Disparities from high resolution images are used for farther objects, while disparities from low resolution ones are used for closer objects.

In the following picture the disparity maps from high, medium and low resolution are displayed in the left column, while the correspondent (red, green, and blue) disparity lines are in the right one. The black plot represents the combined line.

Observe the errors in the high resolution disparity map when looking at a close object, that can be recovered with the lower resolution images.


3. Stereo Head Calibration

Camera calibration is the process of relating the ideal model of the camera to the actual imaging device and of determining the position and orientation of the camera with respect to a world reference system.
This is a fundamental step for 3D reconstruction and in particular for stereo vision analysis.

3.1 Disparities from distorted images

Let us show first a motivating example. The following pictures show a stereo camera, that has been put in front of a straight wall, and the disparities computed by the matching algorithm (i.e. before triangulation). The last picture is the plot of the disparities along one of the rows of the diparity map.

Observe that the radial distortion (that is pretty high for these lenses) affects both the correct determination of point correspondences and the computation of disparities between points.
In fact, the disparity line, that should be straight since we are looking at a straight wall, presents a curvature because of the radial distortion of the lenses. Furthermore this error increases when range values are extracted from disparities.

A calibration method is needed in order to find the internal parameters of the camera and then undistort the images before applying the stereo algorithm.

3.2 Disparities from undistorted images

Using the undistorted images the disparities computed by the matching algorithm are much more precise (as shown below).

An easy semi-automatic calibration procedure for stereo cameras is presented here.


4. Implementation

The following picture shows the architectural schema of the implemented system.

The images coming from the camera are first warped to remove lens distortion, then they are splitted in three pairs with different resolution and only a horizontal portion of the images is considered, as we are mapping range data in a 2D environment. The three pair of images are processed by the stereo algorithm that returns three disparity maps. These are sampled and integrated in order to obtain a single 1D disparity line. Finally triangulation is applied for retrieving range information.


5. Performance Evaluation

The following table illustrates time performance evaluation obtained with a Pentium II 233 MHz processor. The overall rate of the system is above 10 Hz, even with no heavy code optimization.

Function Time
Acquisition and warping 19 ms
Multiresolution stereo 53 ms
Triangulation and Display 8 ms
Overall time 80 ms


6. Applications


7. Previous Work

Project Organization Robot model Vision hardware Performances Calibration
Spinoza (1997) Univ. of British Columbia RWI B12 3 b/w cameras
2 DSPs
2 transputers
2 Hz
Extension of Tsai method
RobotVis (1993) INRIA 3 cameras
3 DSPs
1 - 5 Hz No radial distortion correction (1997).


8. What's missing



Thanks to SRI Int. AI Center for welcoming me, and in particular to Kurt Konolige for his valuable support.
I would have never learned so much about stereo vision and camera calibration without attending a course in Stanford given by Carlo Tomasi.


Luca Iocchi. April 6 1998.

Go to:
Stereo triangulation
Stereo Camera Calibration
Hough Internal Calibration