Monocular Vision Sensor-Based Indoor Road and Stair Detection

Road detection is an essential component of indoor robot navigation. Vision sensors have great advantages in road detection as they can provide rich information in terms of environmental perception. In this paper, a monocular vision sensor-based method for indoor road and stair detection is proposed, which detects feasible areas in indoor environments very fast without paying attention to detailed features of walls or other obstacles. More specifically, for a given indoor road image captured by an on-board vision sensor, the simple linear iterative clustering (SLIC) algorithm-based approach for efficient image segmentation is introduced. Then, according to the DBSCAN algorithm, the generated superpixels are clustered to form large areas of view. The initial road area is obtained through a safe window on the middle bottom of the image. In order to achieve a more accurate road segmentation, the initial image is processed by the binary search, edge detection based on the Canny operator and straight-line detection and location based on the Hough transform, which integrates edge and stair information into road detection. Several experiments are performed to evaluate the performance of the proposed method. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method could accurately detect road information and staircase information in images and succeeds in addressing the indoor road-detection problem.