Image Mapping and Visual Attention on a Sensory Ego-Sphere
Kathering A. Fleming, Richard Alan Peters II, and Bobby Bodenheimer
2006 IEEE/RSJ Conference on Intelligent Robotics and Systems (IROS)
Abstract
The Sensory Ego-Sphere (SES) is a short-term memory for a robot in the
form of an egocentric, tessellated, spherical, sensory-motor map of
the robot's locale. This paper reports on: (1) the mapping to the SES
of images with much higher resolution than the SES itself, and (2) the
processing of visual attention on the SES. Described is a procedure to
store spatially-overlapping imagery in the SES database and to
generate and update a spherical composite of its visual contents. The
composite image serves both as a visual map of the locale and as a
representation of the local contents of the underlying full-resolution
imagery. Visual attention enables fast alignment of overlapping images
without warping or position optimization, since an attentional point
(AP) on the composite typically corresponds to one on each of the
collocated regions in the images. Such alignment speeds analysis of
the multiple images of the area. Compositing and attention were
performed two ways and compared: (1) APs were computed directly on the
composite and not on the full resolution images until the time of
retrieval. (2) The attentional operator was applied to all incoming
imagery. Then the locations and values of the APs on the composite
were computed as a function of those points within the corresponding
regions of the collocated images. It was found that although the
second method was slower, it produced consistent and, thereby, more
useful APs.
Bobby Bodenheimer 