Detecting scene elements using maximally stable colour regions

Abstract

Image processing for autonomous robots is nowadays very popular. In our paper, we show a method how to extract information from a camera attached on a robot to acquire locations of targets the robot is looking for. We apply maximally stable colour regions (a method originally used for image matching) to obtain an initial set of candidate regions. This set is then filtered using application specific filters to find only the regions that correspond to scene elements of interest. The presented method has been applied in practice and performs well even under varying illumination conditions since it does not rely heavily on manually specified colour thresholds. Furthermore, no colour calibration is needed. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.