Qualitative route scene description using autonomous landmark detection

This paper introduces an approach to build a qualitative description of scenes along a route, which is used in route recognition by a mobile robot. The description consists of a series of landmarks autonomously selected by the robot from a panoramic view, which has been generated as a visual memory of scenes along routes. The basic idea to bridge the quantitative panoramic view to qualitative landmarks is to examine the `distinctiveness´ of patterns in the image and select landmarks from unique patterns that are remarkably by which to navigate