Understanding the meaning of shape description for interactive object recognition

Abstract

Service robots need to be able to recognize objects located in complex environments. Although there has been recent progress in this area, it remains difficult for autonomous vision systems to recognize objects in natural conditions. Thus we propose an interactive object recognition system, which asks the user to verbally provide information about the objects that it cannot recognize. However, humans may use various expressions to describe objects. Meanwhile, the same verbal expression may indicate different meanings depending on the situation. Thus we have examined human descriptions of object shapes through experiments using human participants. This paper presents the findings from the experiments useful in designing interactive object recognition systems. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.