In visual navigation, landmarks can be used in a number of different ways. In this paper, we investigate the role of global and local landmarks in virtual environment navigation. We performed an experiment in a virtual environment called ‘‘Hexatown,’’ consisting of a regular hexagonal grid of streets and junctions. Each junction was identiŽed by the presence of distinct local landmarks (buildin...

One approach to explaining the conditions under which additional landmarks will be learned or ignored relates to the nature of the information provided by the landmarks (i.e., distance versus bearings). In the current experiment, we tested the ability of such an approach to explain the search behavior of human participants in a virtual landmark-based navigation task by manipulating whether land...

Landmarks for propositional planning tasks are variable assignments that must occur at some point in every solution plan. We propose a novel approach for using landmarks in planning by deriving a pseudo-heuristic and combining it with other heuristics in a search framework. The incorporation of landmark information is shown to improve success rates and solution qualities of a heuristic planner....

This paper investigates the function and formation of spatial language involving landmarks. We argue for two points. First, landmarks have an important function in spatial language. Agents that can use different landmarks and express their choice perform better than agents who cannot. Second, the use of landmarks has a positive effect on evolving systems of spatial relations. Agents that have t...

We introduce a non-iterative geometric-based method for shape matching using a novel set of geometric landmarks residing on a 2D contours. These landmarks are intrinsic and are computed from the differential geometry of the curve. We exploit the invariant properties of geometric landmarks that are local and preserved under the affine and some perspective transformation. Geometric invariant expl...

Selecting landmarks for use by a navigating mobile robot is important for map-building systems. However, it can also provide a way by which robots can communicate route information, so that one robot can tell another how to find a goal location. A route through an environment can be described by the landmarks encountered along the path, and a robot following the same path must identify the perc...

Urban landmarks are frequently used in way-finding and representations of spatial knowledge. However, assessing the salience of urban landmarks is difficult. Moreover, no method exists to rapidly extract urban landmarks from basic geographic information databases. The goal of this paper is to solve these problems from the dual aspects of spatial knowledge representation and public spatial cogni...

Face synthesis is an important problem in computer vision with many applications. In this work, we describe a new method, namely LandmarkGAN, to synthesize faces based on facial landmarks as input. Facial are natural, intuitive, and effective representation for expressions orientations, which independent from the target’s texture or color background scene. Our method able transform set of into ...