Topological maps based on graphs of planar regions

Topological visual maps contain different abstraction levels of information that can be used by robots to carry out different activities. We propose here a new hierarchical structure in which landmarks extracted from conventional images are grouped creating a graph of planar regions. The new hierarchy improves previous approaches based on images reducing both, the size of the graph and its complexity. In order to segment and group the planar regions of a sequence of images a new approach based on the simultaneous matching of two images and the previously extracted planar regions is proposed. We also consider multi-plane restrictions so that the method is robust to the appearance of new planes. The paper presents two contributions. First the triple matching approach to extract all the planes seen in the set of images and second a new topological map construction based on a graph of planar regions which can be used by mobile robots to localize and move in the environment. Experiments with real images in both indoor and outdoor environments show good performance of our proposal.