Detection of indoor and outdoor stairs

There are a few applications in which stairs must be detected, for example for aiding blind persons during navigation and for autonomous robots which must rely on vision. . In this paper we present a very simple algorithm for detecting stairs, both in indoor and outdoor environments, when the camera is at a distance of approximately five meters from the stairs. The problem is hard to solve due to different factors like lighting, different constructions, materials and view angles. However, first results are very promising, although false positive and negative detections cannot yet be avoided