Shape-guided superpixel grouping for trail detection and tracking

Abstract— We describe a framework for detecting and tracking continuous ”trails” in images and image sequences for autonomous robot navigation. Continuous trails are extended regions along the ground such as roads, hiking paths, rivers, and pipelines which can be navigationally useful for ground-based or aerial robots. Our approach to single-image trail segmentation incorporates both bottom-up and top-down processes. First, good grouping hypotheses are efficiently generated by probabilistic clustering of superpixels based on color similarity. Second, hypotheses are robustly ranked with an objective function comprising shape, appearance, and deformation terms. The shape term measures how well a triangle, the approximate template for a trail viewed under perspective, can be fit to the grouping’s boundary. The appearance term reflects the visual contrast between the grouping and its surroundings using a between-class/within-class scatter measure. Finally, the deformation term m...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: IROS
• Authors: Christopher Rasmussen, Donald Scott
• Keywords: Deformation Term, Image Sequences, IROS 2008, Robotics, Trail