Stereopsis and scene partitioning for terrain interpretation

Determining the planar orientation of the ground surface provides useful additional cues for enhanced performance in various image processing applications. For example, it can provide conflict resolution in target aspect and thus improvement in target classification. It can help in ground vehicle navigation where extremely high slopes or banks would reduce the traversibility of the vehicle. Similarly, it can also be useful in nap -of- the -earth air vehicle navigation through terrain following terrain avoidance. This paper discusses a passive technique to estimate ground plane orientations for scene interpretation. The scene registration problem is handled through a two -dimensional segment -free differential operator. Ranges to points in the scene are computed via an optical flow generation technique and the scene reconstruction is accomplished by a combination of first and second order gradients of the range map.