Adaptive segmentation of color image for vision navigation of mobile robots

Abstract

The self-localization problem is very important when the mobile robot has to move in autonomous way. Among techniques for self-localization, landmark-based approach is preferred for its simplicity and much less memory demanding for descriptions of robot surroundings. Door-plates are selected as visual landmarks. In this paper, we present an adaptive segmentation approach based on Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and scale-space filtering. To speed up the entire color segmentation and use the color information as a whole, PCA is implemented to project tristimulus R, G and B color space to the first principal component (1st PC) axis direction and scale-space filtering is used to get the centers of color classes. This method has been tested in the color segmentation of door-plate images captured by mobile robot CASIA-1. Experimental results are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of this proposed method. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.