Shang-En Tsai

Shang-En Tsai

Specular glare on reflective floors, glass boundaries, and glossy indoor surfaces frequently corrupts active-stereo RGB-D depth measurements, producing holes and spikes that accumulate as persistent phantom obstacles in occupancy-grid costmaps. This paper presents a glare-resilient costmap construction method based on explicit depth-reliability modeling. A lightweight Depth Reliability Map network (DRM-Net) predicts per-pixel measurement trustworthiness under specular interference, and a reliability-guided weighted-and-gated fusion (RGF) mechanism modulates occupancy updates before corrupted measurements are accumulated into the map. To support robust training and evaluation, the method uses pose-aligned multi-view reference-depth construction to reduce circular-supervision bias and is evaluated through fusion-variant ablations, parameter-sensitivity analysis, cross-condition tests, paired navigation comparisons, reliability-map metrics, and embedded runtime profiling. Experiments on a real mobile robotic platform equipped with an Intel RealSense D435 and a Jetson Orin Nano show that the proposed method reduces false obstacle insertion, improves free-space preservation, and maintains real-time throughput under reflective-floor, glass-wall, and natural-light glare conditions. These results support treating glare as a measurement-reliability problem rather than as a dense depth-completion problem for safety-critical indoor navigation.

Shang-En Tsai, Wei-Cheng Sun

Specular glare on reflective floors and glass surfaces frequently corrupts RGB-D depth measurements, producing holes and spikes that accumulate as persistent phantom obstacles in occupancy-grid costmaps. This paper proposes a glare-resilient costmap construction method based on explicit depth-reliability modeling. A lightweight Depth Reliability Map (DRM) estimator predicts per-pixel measurement trustworthiness under specular interference, and a Reliability-Guided Fusion (RGF) mechanism uses this signal to modulate occupancy updates before corrupted measurements are accumulated into the map. Experiments on a real mobile robotic platform equipped with an Intel RealSense D435 and a Jetson Orin Nano show that the proposed method substantially reduces false obstacle insertion and improves free-space preservation under real reflective-floor and glass-surface conditions, while introducing only modest computational overhead. These results indicate that treating glare as a measurement-reliability problem provides a practical and lightweight solution for improving costmap correctness and navigation robustness in safety-critical indoor environments.