Playing Robot Soccer under Natural Light: A Case Study

The recent debate in the RoboCup middle-size community about natural light conditions shows that a more in-depth analysis of the problems incurred by this is necessary in order to draft out a focused and realistic roadmap for research. Based on real-world images taken under varying lighting conditions, we performed descriptive and statistical analysis of the effects on color-based vision routines. The results show that pure color-based image processing is not likely to perform well under varying lighting conditions, even if the vision system is calibrated on a per-game base. We conclude that color-based vision has to be combined with other methods and algorithms in order to work robustly in more difficult environments with varying illumination.