We address the problem of semantic mapping using mobile robots. We focus on the problem of mapping activity as a precursor to automatically classifying, modeling and ultimately understanding the usage of space in a typical urban outdoor environment. We propose and compare two methods for activity mapping one based on hidden Markov models and the other based on support vector machines. Both appr...

In this paper, we propose a new and simple approach to obstacle and free space detection in an indoor and outdoor environment in real-time using stereo vision as sensor. The real-time obstacle detection algorithm uses two dimensional disparity map to detect obstacles in the scene without constructing the ground plane. The proposed approach combines an accumulating and thresholding techniques to...

The data related in this paper are related to "Environmental-behavior studies of sustainable construction of the third place - based on outdoor environment-behavior cross-feed symbiotic analysis and verification of selective activities" (Ren, 2017) [1]. The dataset was from a field sub-time extended investigation to children of Hohhot West Inner Mongolia Electric Power Community Residential Are...

What makes a neighborhood space vital? This article explores the possibility that the presence of trees and grass may be one of the key components of vital neighborhood spaces. We report on 758 observations of individuals in 59 outdoor common spaces in a residential development. Twenty-seven of the neighborhood common spaces were relatively green, whereas 32 were relatively barren. Results indi...

The structural design of buildings and streets in man-made outdoor environments determine the possible locations of other objects like cars or people. Cars drive or park on the streets, and people walk on the sidewalks. Their space of interaction is limited and aligned to these man-made structures. In this report, we describe how 3D locations of objects can be estimated in a single view image. ...

An adaptive technique for color image segmentation is presented in this paper. The segmentation is performed using a multiresolution scheme and considering the background areas have quite uniform color features at a low-resolution representation of the image. First, a pyramidal representation of the original image is built. Then segmentation is improved iteratively at each resolution using colo...

Most pose (3D position and 3D orientation) tracking methods using vision require a priori knowledge about the environment and correspondences between 3D environment features and 2D images. This environmental information is difficult to acquire accurately for large working volumes or may not be available at all, especially for outdoor environments. As a result, most pose tracking methods using v...

Laser pointers are one of the most widely used interactive and pointing devices in different human-computer interaction systems. Existing approaches to vision-based laser spot tracking are designed for controlled indoor environments with the main assumption that the laser spot is very bright, if not the brightest, spot in images. In this work, we are interested in developing a method for an out...

A new method for the automated selection of colour features is described. The algorithm consists of two stages of processing. In the first, a complete set of colour features is calculated for every object of interest in an image. In the second stage, each object is mapped into several ndimensional feature spaces in order to select the feature set with the smallest variables able to discriminate...

To achieve robust color perception under varying light conditions in indoor and outdoor environments, we propose a three-step method consisting of adaptive camera parameter control, image segmentation and color classification. A controller for the intrinsic camera parameters is used to improve color stability in the YUV space. Segmentation is done to detect spatially coherent regions of uniform...