Visual Recognition of Types of Corridor Segments for Mobile Robots

This paper presents a visual recognition method to identify types of corridor segments such as T-junctions, L-junctions, and dead ends using vanishing point-based visual features and a two-layer recognition framework. This approach is useful for efficient robot navigation in the sense that a mobile robot is able to recognize the corridor segment type before reaching it, allowing the robot to make navigation decisions in advance. Furthermore, owing to our novel visual features made by using nonvertical vanishing points satisfying Manhattan world assumption, it is more probable for a mobile robot to recognize corridor segment types under partial occlusion by human. Experimental results have also been provided to demonstrate the validity of the proposed approach in real world environments. 2012 Taylor & Francis and The Robotics Society of Japan