Dominant plane detection from optical flow for robot navigation

Dominant plane is an area which occupies the largest domain in the image. In this paper, we develop an algorithm for dominant plane detection using the optical flow. The dominant plane estimation is an essential task for the autonomous navigation and the path planning of the mobile robot, since the robot moves on the dominant plane. We show that the points on the dominant plane in a pair of two successive images are combined with an affine transformation if the mobile robot obtains successive images for optical flow computation. Therefore, our algorithm detects the dominant plane from images observed by an uncalibrated camera without any assumptions of camera displacement.