Representing Scenes Along a Route by a Moving Observer

How can a robot autonomously represent and memorize the route it has passed ? As a step toward the solution, this paper presents an intermediate representation, called Panoramic Representation, of scenes along the route, which provides rich information on the route such as a dynamic 2-D projection and a path-oriented 2(1/2)-D sketch. Rather than analyzing local views at discrete locations and integrating them into a model, the robot continuously scans the side-view and yields the Panoramic Representation, based upon an extended Spatiotemporal Volume analysis. Matching of incoming imagery in an autonomous navigation with the Panoramic Representation, memorized in the trial navigation guided by a human, is possible by 2-D or 2(1/2)-D shape matching. The Panoramic Representation is further analyzed to obtain a qualitative description of the route by selecting distinctive patterns either in color, shape or depth as landmarks.