Visual feature extraction for recognition of types of corridor segments under partial occulusion

This paper presents a visual recognition method to identify types of corridor segments such as T-junctions, L-junctions and ends of the corridors, using vanishing point-based visual features and a two-layer HMM framework. The main advantage of our approach is that a mobile robot can recognize the types of corridor segments under partial occlusion. This is important for robust robot navigation in real environment, in which a corridor segment is frequently occluded by people. Several experimental results are provided to demonstrate the validity of the proposed approach in a real environment.