Topological segmentation of indoors/outdoors sequences of spherical views

Topological navigation consists for a robot in navigating in a topological graph which nodes are topological places. Either for indoor or outdoor environments, segmentation into topological places is a challenging issue. In this paper, we propose a common approach for indoor and outdoor environment segmentation without elaborating a complete topological navigation system. The approach is novel in that environment sensing is performed using spherical images. Environment structure estimation is performed by a global structure descriptor specially adapted to the spherical representation. This descriptor is processed by a custom designed algorithm which detects change-points defining the segmentation between topological places.