Qualitative Visual Environment Retrieval

A system for retrieval of an unstructured environment under static and dynamic scenarios is proposed. The use of cylindrical mosaics or omnidirectional images is exploited for providing a rich description about the surrounding environment spanning 360 deg. The environment description is based on defining the attributes of the nodes of a graph derived from the angular partitions of the captured images. Content-based image retrieval for each of these partitions is performed on an exemplar image database to annotate the nodes of the graph. The complete environment description is recovered by collating the retrieval results over all the partitions based on a simple voting scheme. This offers a qualitative description of the location in a totally natural and unstructured surrounding. The experiments yield quite promising results