Towards RoboCup without Color Labeling

Object recognition and localization methods in RoboCup work on color segmented camera images. Unfortunately, color labeling can be applied to object recognition tasks only in very restricted environments, where different kinds of objects have different colors. To overcome these limitations we propose an algorithm named the Contracting Curve Density (CCD) algorithm for fitting parametric curves to image data. The method neither assumes object specific color distributions, nor specific edge profiles, nor does it need threshold parameters. Hence, no training phase is needed. In order to separate adjacent regions we use local criteria which are based on local image statistics. We apply the method to the problem of localizing the ball and show that the CCD algorithm reliably localizes the ball even in the presence of heavily changing illumination, strong clutter, specularity, partial occlusion, and texture