Simultaneous place and object recognition with mobile robot using pose encoded contextual information

Place and object recognition are two fundamental problems for mobile robot to understand its surroundings. In the field of computer vision it has been acknowledged that context plays an important role in image parsing, but in most of the researches contextual information is only used in one direction and little attention is paid to the relative pose context between objects and local features. We observe, however, place and object can serve as context to each other, that is the recognition of one facilitates the recognition of the other. In this paper, a new hierarchical random field which can encode multiple kinds of context including co-occurrence context, temporal context and relative pose context is proposed for simultaneous place and object recognition with a mobile platform. And a new kind of relative pose context, which is scale and rotation invariant, is defined to improve the stability of pose-encoded context. Experimental results with a mobile robot prove that the proposed method significantly improve the precision of the place and object recognition in familiar and unfamiliar environments.