Evaluation of a Real-Time Kinetic Depth System

We describe a robot vision system which produces a depth map in real time by means of motion parallax or kinetic depth. A video camera is held by a robot which moves so that a given point in space is kept fixated on the centre of the camera's imaging surface. The optical flow is calculated in a Datacube MaxVideo system and a full-frame depth map is produced 12.5 times per second. Calculated depths show an average 10 % discrepancy with measured depths over 7 nonconsecutive images. sponding to the direction of the target point which are closer to the robot than the target point would indicate the presence of an obstacle. The first step in this process is the construction of the kinetic depth system and the second step is to evaluate its sensitivity to system parameters. We describe th