Robust Corner Detection by Image-Based Direct Curvature Field Estimation for Mobile Robot Navigation

In this paper, a novel corner detection method is presented, to extract geometrically important corners for robot applications, such as indoor mobile robot navigation or manipulation. Intensity‐based corner detectors, such as the Harris corner, can detect corners in noisy environments, but have inaccurate corner positions and miss the corners of obtuse angles. Edge‐based corner detectors, such as the Curvature Scale Space, can detect structural corners, but show unstable corner detection due to incomplete edge detection in noisy environments. The proposed image‐based direct curvature estimation can overcome limitations in both the inaccurate structural corner detection of the Harris corner detector (intensity‐ based) and the unstable corner detection of the Curvature Scale Space, caused by incomplete edge detection. Various experimental results validate the robustness of the proposed method.