A new object recognition system for service robots in the smart environment

This paper describes a new object recognition system for service robots in a smart environment full of RFID tags and connected by wireless networks. Object recognition is one of the basic functionalities a service robot should perform and many researchers have attempted to make the service robot recognize objects through vision processing in natural environments. However there is no conventional vision system that can recognize target objects robustly in a real-world workspace. In our smart environment, flexibility and robustness in object recognition are provided with the help of RFID tags and communication networks. RFID tags provide the presence and identity information of the object and the robot can recognize the object through vision processing based on a detected RFID code and downloaded visual descriptor information. For feature descriptors, we adopted MPEG-7 visual descriptors due to its concise and unambiguous description of the complex media contents. This paper focuses on developing our object recognition engine based on visual descriptors information in the smart environment. To this end, we propose a new object recognition architecture for service robots, and present a implemented matching algorithm on the basis of MPEG-7 visual descriptors such as color and texture. Experimental results show that the proposed system works well with good performance in terms of recognition rate. This object recognition system will be incorporated into our service robot platform and a pose estimation module is to be included in the next version of our object recognition system.