Qualitative image based localization in indoors environments

Man made indoor environments possess regularities, which can be efficiently exploited in automated model acquisition by means of visual sensing. In this context we propose an approach for inferring a topological model of an environment from images or the video stream captured by a mobile robot during exploration. The proposed model consists of a set of locations and neighborhood relationships between them. Initially each location in the model is represented by a collection of similar, temporally adjacent views, with the similarity defined according to a simple appearance based distance measure. The sparser representation is obtained in a subsequent learning stage by means of learning vector quantization (LVQ). The quality of the model is tested in the context of qualitative localization scheme by means of location recognition: given a new view, the most likely location where that view came from is determined.