Fast Adaptive Object Detection towards a Smart Environment by a Mobile Robot

This paper proposes a novel method to detect objects by a mobile robot which adapts to an environment. Such a robot would help human designers of a smart environment to recognize objects in the environment with their attributes, which significantly facilitates his/her design. We first introduce Lifting Complex Wavelet Transform (LCWT) which plays an important role in this work. Since the LCWT has a set of controllable free parameters, we can design the LCWTs with various properties by tuning their parameters. In this paper we construct a set of LCWTs so that they can extract local features from an image by multi-scale. The extracted local features must be robust against several kinds of changes of the image such as shift, scale and rotation. Our method can design these LCWTs by selecting their parameters so that the mobile robot adapts to the environment. Applying the new set of LCWTs to the images captured by the mobile robot in the environment, a local feature database can be constructed. By using this database, we implement an object detection system based on LCWTs on the mobile robot. Effectiveness of our method is demonstrated by several test results using the mobile robot.