Image based rendering for a mobile robot using visual landmarks

Image based rendering (IBR) is one of standard approaches to view synthesis. IBR would be very important for human-robot interface system (HRI) such as a teleoperation system, since the synthesized views are helpful for a human user to understand the robot's operating environment. In this paper, we address the problem of IBR on images taken by a mobile robot. Main difficulty of our problem is that the viewpoint locations of input (real) images are not precisely known, due to estimation errors inherent in the positioning systems. To solve this problem, we will propose a novel IBR method, where the location uncertainty is reduced using a visual landmark, which is commonly used in mobile robotics. In addition, novel priors on real images are introduced to regularize the IBR problem. As a result, IBR can be performed successfully under the location uncertainty.