pen are normally related to a limited view onto the
wall, which either occurs when the wall is occluded
by some close object (e.g. truck), or the cameras tem-
porarily point away from the wall. If the optimiza-
tion was rejected we carry over the prediction as cur-
rent estimate and continue like that until the wall is in
proper view again.
The estimated plane parameters for both walls in a
sequence over 450 frames are plotted in Figure 8. The
upper diagram shows the angle between groundplane
and walls, the bottom diagram shows the plane dis-
tance parameters. The distances add up to the street
width, for this sequence with a mean of 9.3m.
The sequence begins on the left sidewalk and ends
on the right sidewalk after crossing the street. It con-
tains several parts in which the walls are out of view
due to the camera heading, some are shown in the
screen shots. As explained earlier, these parts are
bridged by predicting the parameters using the ego-
motion and are shaded in the diagram.
4 CONCLUSIONS
We have demonstrated two approaches towards esti-
mating the local, geometric structure in the scenario
of urban street canyons. We model the right and left
building walls as planar surfaces and estimate the un-
derlying plane parameters from 3D data points ob-
tained from a passive stereo-camera system, which is
replaceable by any kind of range sensor as long the
uncertainties of reconstructed 3D points are known
and can be considered.
The presented approaches are not intended as a
standalone version. Their purpose is rather to separate
a set of inlier points fitting the plane model to initial-
ize optimization procedures as we applied in form of
the iterative least-squares. By taking visual odometry
in combination with a prediction and update step into
the loop we are able to present a stable approach to
keep track of groundplane and both walls.
Future work includes integrating the rich informa-
tion offered by the depth-registered image intensity
values and relaxing the assumptions implied by the
street canyon scenario.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The work was supported by the German Federal Min-
istry of Education and Research within the project
OIWOB. The authors would like to thank the
”Karlsruhe School of Optics and Photonics” for sup-
porting this work.
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