Vision System of Mobile Robot Combining Binocular and Depth Cameras

In order to optimize the three-dimensional (3D) reconstruction and obtain more precise actual distances of the object, a 3D reconstruction system combining binocular and depth cameras is proposed in this paper. The whole system consists of two identical color cameras, a TOF depth camera, an image processing host, a mobile robot control host, and amobile robot. Because of structural constraints, the resolution of TOF depth camera is very low, which difficultly meets the requirement of trajectory planning. The resolution of binocular stereo cameras can be very high, but the effect of stereo matching is not ideal for low-texture scenes. Hence binocular stereo cameras also difficultly meet the requirements of high accuracy. In this paper, the proposed system integrates depth camera and stereo matching to improve the precision of the 3D reconstruction. Moreover, a double threads processing method is applied to improve the efficiency of the system. The experimental results show that the system can effectively improve the accuracy of 3D reconstruction, identify the distance from the camera accurately, and achieve the strategy of trajectory planning.