Filtering algorithm of line structured light for long-distance obstacle detection

Since unmanned ground vehicles often encounter concave and convex obstacles in wild ground, a filtering algorithm using line structured light to detect these long distance obstacles is proposed. For the line structured light image, a ranked-order based adaptively extremum median (RAEM) filter algorithm on salt and pepper noise is presented. In the algorithm, firstly effective points and noise points in a filtering window are differentiated; then the gray values of noise points are replaced by the medium of gray values of the effective pixels, with the efficient points' gray values unchanged; in the end this algorithm is proved to be efficient by experiments. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can remove noise points effectively and minimize the image blur, resulting into protecting the edge information as much as possible.