Research and development on embedded omnidirectional vision tracker for vision navigation

Omni-directional vision appears the definite significance since its advantage of acquiring all vision information simultaneously. In this paper, an integrated omni-directional vision tracker based on the configuration with CMOS, FPGA and DSP has been implemented. Fisheye lens is one of the most efficient ways to establish omni-directional vision systems, however, it appear with an unavoidable inherent distortion. An imaging system model which consists of fisheye-lens and the embedded tracker has been proposed. A novel beacon owning the feature of particular topology shape can be identified by the appropriative recognition processes. Particle filter has been programmed as an intersectional arithmetic structure which processes the same step of several particle filters simultaneously. We called it as Multiple Intersection Particle Filter. MIPF makes multi-targets tracking efficiently and successfully on embedded platform. A rectification technique based on equidistant projection theorem is used for correction some distorted image point. The localization method just employs the picture position of two objects to estimate the space position and orientation for AGV. After target recognition, vision tracking, rectification, and object positioning functions actualized on the embedded omni-directional vision tracker, autonomous navigation has been demonstrated on experimental AGV.