Room classification using a hierarchical representation of space

Mobile robots need an effective spatial model for the successful operation in real-world environment. The model should be compact and simultaneously possess large expressive power. Moreover, it should scale well. In this paper we propose a new hierarchical representation of space, whose compositional structure is learned based on statistically significant observations. We have focused on a two dimensional space, since many robots perceive their surroundings in two dimensions with the use of a laser range finder or a sonar. We also propose the use of a low-level image descriptor for addressing the room classification problem, by which we demonstrate the performance of our representation. Using only the lower layers of the hierarchy, we obtain state-of-the-art classification results on demanding datasets.