Towards Robust Object Categorization on a Mobile Robot

An efficient object perception is a crucial component of a mobile service robot. In this work we present a solution for visual categorization of objects. We developed a prototypic categorization system which classifies unknown objects based on their visual properties to a corresponding category of predefined domestic object categories. The system uses the Bag of Features approach which does not rely on global geometric object information. A major contribution of our work is the enhancement of the categorization accuracy and robustness through a combination of a set of supervised machine learners which are trained with visual information from example objects. Experimental results are provided which benchmark the behavior and verify the performance regarding the accuracy and robustness of the proposed system. The system is integrated on a mobile service robot to enhance its perceptual capabilities, hence computational cost and robot dependent properties are considered as essential design criteria.