A Safe Fault Tolerant Multi-view Approach for Vision-Based Protective Devices

Abstract

We present a new approach that realizes an imagebasedfault tolerant distance computation for a multi-viewcamera system which conservatively approximates theshortest distance between unknown objects and 3Dvolumes. Our method addresses the industrial applicationof vision-based protective devices which are used to detectintrusions of humans into areas of dangerous machinery,in order to prevent injuries. This requires hardwareredundancy for compensation of hardware failureswithout loss of functionality and safety. By taking sensorfailures during the fusion process of distances fromdifferent cameras into account, this is realized implicitly,with the benefit of no additional hardware cost. Inparticular we employ multiple camera perspectives forsafe and non-conservative occlusion handling of obstaclesand formulate general system assumptions which are alsoappropriate for other applications like multi-viewreconstruction methods.