Appearance-Based Place Recognition for Topological Localization

This paper presents a new appearance-based place recognition system for topological localization. The method uses a panoramic vision system to sense the environment. Color images are classified in real-time based on nearest-neighbor learning, image histogram matching, and a simple voting scheme. The system has been evaluated with eight cross-sequence tests in four unmodified environments, three indoors and one outdoors. In all eight cases, the system successfully tracked the mobile robot’s position. The system correctly classified between 87% and 98% of the input color images. For the remaining images, the system was either momentarily confused or uncertain, but never classified an image incorrectly.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2000
• Where: ICRA
• Authors: Iwan Ulrich, Illah R. Nourbakhsh
• Keywords: Appearance-based Place Recognition, Color Images, ICRA 2000, Image Histogram Matching, Robotics