Fast Indoor Scene Classification Using 3D Point Clouds

Abstract

A representation of space that includes both geometric and semantic information enables a robot to perform high-level tasks in complex environments. Identifying and categorizing environments based on onboard sensors are essential in these scenarios. The Kinect™, a 3D low cost sensor is appealing in these scenarios as it can provide rich information. The downside is the presence of large amount of information, which could lead to higher computational complexity. In this paper, we propose a methodology to efficiently classify indoor environments into semantic categories using Kinect™ data. With a fast feature extraction method along with an efficient feature selection algorithm (DEFS) and, support vector machines (SVM) classifier, we could realize a fast scene classification algorithm. Experimental results in an indoor scenario are presented including comparisons with its counterpart of commonly available 2D laser range finder data.