<title>Behaviors for active object recognition</title>

Abstract

The concept of active object recognition is introduced and a proposal for its solution is described. It is argued that single-view object recognition is fraught with problems, mainly due to viewpoint-related ambiguities, occlusions and coincidences. Recognition which is active, that is, that has the ability to vary viewpoint according to the interpretation status, is both more viable and more closely related to the manner in which humans recognize different objects. An active system may be achieved via a simple modification of the recognition hardware. The camera is mounted on the end of a robot arm on a mobile base. The system exploits the mobility of the camera by using low-level image data to drive the camera to a special viewpoint with respect to an unknown object. From such a viewpoint, the object recognition task is reduced to a two-dimensional pattern recognition problem. This paper describes the behavior-based approach to camera motion, that ensures robust acquisition of special views of the object to be recognized.