View synthesis on mobile robot image database

Abstract

In this paper, we address the problem of image based rendering (IBR) on images taken by a mobile robot, called robot image database. IBR is a standard approach to view synthesis that would be very important for human-robot interface systems such as a teleoperation system, since synthesized views are helpful for a human user to understand the robot's operating environment. Main difficulty of our problem is that the viewpoint locations of input (real) images are not precisely known, due to estimation errors inherent in the positioning systems. To solve this problem, we propose a novel IBR method, where the location uncertainty is reduced using a visual landmark, which is commonly used in mobile robotics. Also, novel priors on real images are introduced to regularize the IBR problem. As a result, IBR can be performed successfully under the location uncertainty