Scale-Invariant Localization of Electric Vehicle Charging Port via Semi-Global Matching of Binocular Images

Abstract

Automatic charging for electric vehicles has broad development prospects for meeting the personalized service experience of users while overcoming the inherent safety hazards. An identification and positioning approach suitable for engineering applications is the key to promoting automatic charging. In this paper, a low-cost, high-precision method to identify and position charging ports based on SIFT and SGBM is proposed. The feature extraction approach based on SIFT is adopted to produce the difference of Gaussian (DOG) for scale space construction, and the feature matching algorithm with nearest-neighbor search, which is a kind of machine learning, is utilized to yield the map set of matching points. In addition, the disparity calculation is conducted with a semi-global matching algorithm to obtain high-precision positioning results for the charging port. In order to verify the feasibility of the method, a complete identification and positioning experiment of charging port was carried out based on OpenCV and MATLAB.