Barrel Detection

The following approaches have been considered:

1. Visual (#1)
   • Find orange pixels (on barrel) with (Pixels) => Red - Green => High-Pass Threshold => (Orange pixels)
   • Find while pixels (on barrel) with (Pixels) => Saturation => Low-Pass Threshold => (White pixels)
   • (Orange pixels) => Blob seperation => Orange stripes (Bounding Boxes)
   • (Orange pixels) => Blob seperation => White stripes (Bounding Boxes)
   • {Orange stripes (Bounding Boxes), White stripes (Bounding Boxes)} => Blob merging => Barrels (Bounding Boxes)
2. Visual (#2)
   • Find orange pixels (on barrel) with (Pixels) => Red - Green => High-Pass Threshold => (Orange pixels)
   • Scan horizontal lines of image, starting from the bottom, and moving up. When currect scan line intersects a sufficient number of orange pixels, mark the orange segment of the line as being the bottom edge of a barrel. Once the bottom edge of a barrel is identified, ignore all pixels above the bottom edge. Continue scanning.
3. SICK
   • Scan distances in front of robot using SICK, and generate a graph
   • Find/distinguish the "plateaus" of the graph. Mark each "plateau" as the near-edge of a barrel.

A Note on Notation

In the above steps, items surrounded with parentheses are data. Other items are analyses or filters.