Selective Visual Attention: Computational Models and Applications

7.5 Applications of Visual Attention in Robots

Object detection and recognition for robots with visual sensors seem similar to that in natural scenes, but in mobile robots there are many differences. First, mobile robots often face complex environments in a dynamic scene as the robots move. Consequently, a mobile robot needs to detect or recognize multiple objects around its surroundings in order to avoid collision of occluded objects and to navigate its motion. Second, in general a robot should create an environmental map to aid its motion in an unknown environment step by step, and localize its position in the map for navigation. An early conventional method of building the map is named simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), which requires features extraction and features tracking in the environment [90]. The robots with visual sensors use the landmarks (features or objects) in the dynamic scene to build the map in SLAM. Detection, tracking and recognition of landmarks are very important in robots. Third, a moving robot results in a moving scene, so detection of moving objects in a moving background is a challenge for object detection. Finally, a robot often has several sensors such as laser and infrared sensors to detect occluded objects, multiple cameras for stereoscopic vision, auditory sensors to receive audio signal streams and so on. The constant stream of multisensory data provides a mass of information that needs to be integrated before making decisions. How to ...