View-invariant regions and mobile robot self-localization

This paper addresses the problem of mobile robot self-localization given a polygonal map and a set of observed edge segments. The standard approach uses interpretation tree search with pruning heuristics to match observed edges to map edges. Our approach introduces a preprocessing step in which the map is decomposed into view-invariant regions (VIRs). The VIR decomposition captures information about map edge visibility, and can be used for a variety of robot navigation tasks.