Panoramic representation of scenes for route understanding

A dynamically generated panoramic representation for route recognition by a mobile robot is presented. The strategies employed are route description from experience and route recognition by visual information. In the description phase, panoramic representation, a representation of scenes along a route, is proposed. It is obtained by scanning scenes sideways along the route, which provides rich information, such as a 2-D projection of scenes called panoramic view, a path-oriented 2-1/2-D sketch, and a path description. The continuous panoramic view is more efficient in processing than integrating discrete views into a complete route model. In the recognition phase, the robot matches the panoramic representation from incoming images with that memorized in the previous scan so that it can locate and orient itself in autonomous navigation. Since the panoramic view covers a wide field of view, one can achieve reliable matching using a coarse-to-fine method, starting from a very coarse level