Increased robustness in visual processing with SOM-based filtering

To increase the robustness of visual processing in the context of mobile robotics, we introduce an image filtering process based on the codebooks computed by the SOM. The Self Organizing Map and the Simple Competitive Learning are used to compute adaptively the vector quantizers of color image sequences. The codebook computed for each image in the sequence is then used as a smoothing filter, the VQ Bayesian Filter (VQ-BF), for the preprocessing of the images in the sequence. This filter is applied to the computation of optical flow at the single pixel level.