Appearance-based segmentation of indoors/outdoors sequences of spherical views

International audienceNavigating in large scale, complex and dynamic environments requires reliable representations able to capture metric, topological and semantic aspects of the scene for sup- porting path planing and real time motion control. In a previous work [11], we addressed metric and topological representations thanks to a multi-cameras system which allows building of dense visual maps of large scale 3D environments. The map is a set of locally accurate spherical panoramas related by 6dof poses graph. The work presented here is a further step toward a semantic representation. We aim at detecting the changes in the structural properties of the scene during navigation. Structural properties are estimated online using a global descriptor relying on spherical harmonics which are particularly well-fitted to capture properties in spherical views. A change-point detection algorithm based on a statistical Neyman-Pearson test allows us to find optimal transitions between topological places. Results are presented and discussed both for indoors and outdoors experiments