This paper presents a qualitative approach based on visual cues for man-made landmark recognition in outdoor as a navigational aid. This work is part of an exploratory effort in which the primary objective is to demonstrate an alternate navigation mode using landmarks for unmanned ground vehicle systems. The proposed approach uses color video as the data input and consists of the following three major functions: (a) eliminating most of the natural background clutter in given imagery, and generating regions of interest (ROIs), (b) extracting arcs, ellipses, circles, rectangles and prescribed geometric shapes in the ROIs, and (c) recognition of man-made landmarks by parts. We present details of each of the modules and the results on real image sequences.

Date Published: 26 June 1997
PDF: 10 pages
Proc. SPIE 3087, Navigation and Control Technologies for Unmanned Systems II, (26 June 1997); doi: 10.1117/12.277213

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 3087:
Navigation and Control Technologies for Unmanned Systems II
Scott A. Speigle, Editor(s)