Appearance Based Object Identification for Mobile Robot Localization in Intelligent Space with Distributed Vision Sensors

Abstract

Robots will be able to coexist with humans and support humans effectively in near future. One of the most important aspects in the development of human-friendly robots is to cooperation between humans and robots. In this paper, we proposed a method for multi-object identification in order to achieve such human-centered system and robot localization in intelligent space. The intelligent space is the space where many intelligent devices, such as computers and sensors, are distributed. The Intelligent Space achieves the human centered services by accelerating the physical and psychological interaction between humans and intelligent devices. As an intelligent device of the Intelligent Space, a color CCD camera module, which includes processing and networking part, has been chosen. The Intelligent Space requires functions of identifying and tracking the multiple objects to realize appropriate services to users under the multi-camera environments. In order to achieve seamless tracking and location estimation many camera modules are distributed. They causes some errors about object identification among different camera modules. This paper describes appearance based object representation for the distributed vision system in Intelligent Space to achieve consistent labeling of all objects. Then, we discuss how to learn the object color appearance model and how to achieve the multi-object tracking under occlusions.