Exploiting similarities for robot perception

A cognitive robot system has to acquire and efficiently store vast knowledge about the world it operates in. To cope with every day tasks, a robot needs to learn, classify and recognize a manifold of different objects. Our work focuses on an object representation scheme that allows storing perceived objects in a compact way. This will enable the system to store extensive information about the world and will ease complex recognition tasks. The human visual system deploys several mechanisms to reduce the amount of information. Our goal is to develop an artificial system that mimics these mechanisms to create representations that can be used in cognitive tasks. In particular, in this paper we will present an approach that exploits similarities among different views of objects. The proposed representation scheme allows for reduction of storage required for the representation of objects and preserves the information about the similarity among objects. This is achieved by selecting ´important views´ of objects, depending on their stability. Furthermore, by extending the same approach to multiple objects, we are able to exploit similarities between objects to find a common representation and to further reduce the storage requirements.