Visual Map Building and Localization with an Appearance-based Approach
F. Amorós, L. Paya, O. Reinoso, L. Fernández, J. Mª Marin
7th Internacional Conference on Informatics, in Control, Automation and Robotics, ICINCO 2010  (Funchal, Madeira (Portugal), June 15-18, 2010)
 ISBN:978-989-8425-01-0  - Vol. 2, pp.423-426

Abstract:

Appearance-based techniques have proved to constitute a robust approach to build a topological map of an
environment using just visual information. In this paper, we describe a complete methodology to build
appearance-based maps from a set of omnidirectional images captured by a robot along an environment.
To extract the most relevant information from the images, we use and compare the performance of several
compressing methods. In this analysis we include their invariance against rotations of the robot on the ground
plane and small changes in the environment. The main objective consists in building a map that the robot
can use in any application where it needs to know its position and orientation within the environment, with
minimum memory requirements and computational cost but with a reasonable accuracy. This way, we present
both a method to build the map and a method to test its performance in future applications.