Visual attention and clustering-based automatic selection of landmarks using single camera

Abstract

An improved method with better selection capability using a single camera was presented in comparison with previous method. To improve performance, two methods were applied to landmark selection in an unfamiliar indoor environment. First, a modified visual attention method was proposed to automatically select a candidate region as a more useful landmark. In visual attention, candidate landmark regions were selected with different characteristics of ambient color and intensity in the image. Then, the more useful landmarks were selected by combining the candidate regions using clustering. As generally implemented, automatic landmark selection by vision-based simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) results in many useless landmarks, because the features of images are distinguished from the surrounding environment but detected repeatedly. These useless landmarks create a serious problem for the SLAM system because they complicate data association. To address this, a method was proposed in which the robot initially collected landmarks through automatic detection while traversing the entire area where the robot performed SLAM, and then, the robot selected only those landmarks that exhibited high rarity through clustering, which enhanced the system performance. Experimental results show that this method of automatic landmark selection results in selection of a high-rarity landmark. The average error of the performance of SLAM decreases 52% compared with conventional methods and the accuracy of data associations increases.