Real-time shape retrieval for robotics using skip Tri-Grams

The real time requirement is an additional constraint on many intelligent applications in robotics, such as shape recognition and retrieval using a mobile robot platform. In this paper, we present a scalable approach for efficiently retrieving closed contour shapes. The contour of an object is represented by piecewise linear segments. A skip Tri-Gram is obtained by selecting three segments in the clockwise order while allowing a constant number of segments to be ¿skipped¿ in between. The main idea is to use skip Tri-Grams of the segments to implicitly encode the distant dependency of the shape. All skip Tri-Grams are used for efficiently retrieving closed contour shapes without pairwise matching feature points from two shapes. The retrieval is at least an order of magnitude faster than other state-of-the-art algorithms. We score 80% in the Bullseye retrieval test on the whole MPEG 7 shape dataset. We further test the algorithm using a mobile robot platform in an indoor environment. 8 objects are used for testing from different viewing directions, and we achieve 82% accuracy.