Techniques and Applications for Persistent Backgrounding in a Humanoid Torso Robot

One of the most basic capabilities for an agent with a vision system is to recognize its own surroundings. Yet surprisingly, despite the ease of doing so, many robots store little or no record of their own visual surroundings. This paper explores the utility of keeping the simplest possible persistent record of the environment of a stationary torso robot, in the form of a collection of images captured from various pan-tilt angles around the robot. We demonstrate that this particularly simple process of storing background images can be useful for a variety of tasks, and can relieve the system designer of certain requirements as well. We explore three uses for such a record: auto-calibration, novel object detection with a moving camera, and developing attentional saliency maps.