Application of visual attention in object search for a mobile robot with an omni-directional vision system

Abstract

A visual attention method for object search for a mobile robot with an Omni-directional vision system is presented. Firstly, the explored scene is separated into salient and non-salient regions in the image and some salient objects in above salient regions are detected with a kind of saliency detection method. And then, SIFT feature points of the salient objects are extracted. The 3D coordinates of the object feature points, which are used to represent the spatial positions of the objects, are computed from the Omni-directional 3D reconstruction method. At last, the first searching region is determined by synthetically considering some factors, such as the number of detected objects in each region and the distance between the objects and the mobile robot. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed method, the experiment is performed in a realistic indoor scenario. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.