Stixels estimation without depth map computation

Mobile robots require object detection and classification for safe and smooth navigation. Stereo vision improves such detection by doubling the views of the scene and by giving indirect access to depth information. This depth information can also be used to reduce the set of candidate detection windows. Up to now, most algorithms compute a depth map to discard unpromising detection windows. We propose a novel approach where a stixel world model is computed directly from the stereo images, without computing an intermediate depth map. We experimentally demonstrate that such approach can considerably reduce the set of candidate detection windows at a fraction of the computation cost of previous approaches.