Predictive visual recognition of types of structural corridor landmarks for mobile robot navigation

This paper presents a predictive visual recognition method to identify types of structural corridor landmark such as T-junctions, L-junctions and ends of the corridors, using vanishing point-based visual features and a two-layer HMM framework. The main advantage of the approach is that a mobile robot can recognize the types of structural landmark before reaching them. This is important for efficient robot navigation because it allows the robot to make navigation decision in advance. Several experimental results are provided to demonstrate the validity of the proposed approach in a real environment.