Adaptive grids: an image-based approach to generate navigation meshes

We propose adaptive grids, an image-based approach for constructing navigation meshes, which are used for path planning. A cellular navigation mesh, called an adaptive grid, is constructed from a top-view range image of a three-dimensional urban model. A navigation graph can then be extracted from this adaptive grid for path planning. We compare our approach with two popular navigation mesh-generation approaches and obtain promising results in terms of path accuracy and memory cost. (C) 2013 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE) [DOI: 10.1117/1.OE.52.2.027002]