Visual contact with catadioptric cameras

Abstract Time to contact or time to collision (TTC) is utmost important information for animals as well as for mobile robots because it enables them to avoid obstacles; it is a convenient way to analyze the surrounding environment. The problem of TTC estimation is largely discussed in perspective images. Although a lot of works have shown the interest of omnidirectional camera for robotic applications such as localization, motion, monitoring, few works use omnidirectional images to compute the TTC. In this paper, we show that TTC can be also estimated on catadioptric images. We present two approaches for TTC estimation using directly or indirectly the optical flow based on de-rotation strat…