Image Understanding for Robotic Applications

Current generation robots work in a constrained environment. In most robotic applications, the environment is known and several aspects of it may be controlled. The knowledge about the environment may be used by image understanding algorithms to facilitate the recovery of information from images. Some difficult problems faced by general image understanding systems are simplified by developing techniques that exploit the available knowledge about the environment. We demonstrate the role of such knowledge in robotic applications for recovering information in dynamic scenes. In the first application, the knowledge of ego-motion parameters of a mobile robot is used for segmentation of a scene and recovery of depth information. In the second application, a hypothesize and test approach is used to find road edges in real scenes for an autonomous vehicle.