Color-contrast landmark detection and encoding in outdoor images

International Conference on Computer Analysis of Images and Patterns (CAIP), 2005, Versalles (Francia)This paper describes a system to extract salient regions from an outdoor image and match them against a database of previously acquired landmarks. Region saliency is based mainly on color contrast, although intensity and texture orientation are also taken into account. Remarkably, color constancy is embedded in the saliency detection process through a novel color ratio algorithm that makes the system robust to illumination changes, so common in outdoor environments. A region is characterized by a combination of its saliency and its color distribution in chromaticity space. The newly acquired landmarks are compared with those already stored in a database, through a quadratic distance metric of their characterizations. Experimentation with a database containing 68 natural landmarks acquired with the system yielded good recognition results, in terms of both recall and rank indices. However, the discrimination between landmarks should be improved to avoid false positives, as suggested by the low precision index.This work was supported by the project 'Sistema reconfigurable para la navegación basada en visión de robots caminantes y rodantes en entornos naturales.' (00).Peer Reviewe

Outdoor view recognition based on landmark grouping and logistic regression

Vision-based robot localization outdoors has remained more elusive than its indoors counterpart. Drastic illumination changes and the scarceness of suitable landmarks are the main difficulties. This paper attempts to surmount them by deviating from the main trend of using local features. Instead, a global descriptor called landmark-view is defined, which aggregates the most visually-salient landmarks present in each scene. Thus, landmark co-occurrence and spatial and saliency relationships between them are added to the single landmark characterization, based on saliency and color distribution. A suitable framework to compare landmark-views is developed, and it is shown how this remarkably enhances the recognition performance, compared against single landmark recognition. A view-matching model is constructed using logistic regression. Experimentation using 45 views, acquired outdoors, containing 273 landmarks, yielded good recognition results. The overall percentage of correct view classification obtained was 80.6%, indicating the adequacy of the approach.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author’s final draft