Real-Time Detection Of Multi-Colored Objects

Abstract

Fast object recognition is critical for robots in the real world. However, geometry-based object recognition methods calculate the pose of the object as part of the recognition process and hence are inherently slow. As a result, they are not suitable for tasks such as searching for an object in a room. If pose calculation is eliminated from the process and a scheme is used that simply detects the likely presence of the object in a scene, considerable efficiency can be gained. This paper contains a discussion of the requirements of any searching task and presents a fast method for detecting the presence of known multi-colored objects in a scene. The method is based on the assumption that the color histogram of an image can contain object "signatures" which are invariant over a wide range of scenes and object poses. The resulting algorithm has been easily implemented in off-the-shelf hardware and used to build a robot system which can sweep its gaze over a room searching for an object.