Pay Attention When Selecting Features

In this paper, we propose a new, hierarchical approach to landmark selection for simultaneous robot localization and mapping based on visual sensors: a biologically motivated attention system finds salient regions of interest (ROIs) in images, and within these regions, Harris corners are detected. This combines the advantages of the ROIs (reducing complexity, enabling good redetectability of regions) with the advantages of the Harris corners (high stability). Reducing complexity is important to meet real-time requirements and stability of features is essential to compute the depth of landmarks from structure from motion with a small baseline. We show that the number of landmarks is highly reduced compared to all Harris corners while maintaining the stability of features for the mapping task