Autonomous landmark selection for route recognition by a mobile robot

The authors introduce an approach to building a qualitative description of scenes along a route, which is used in route recognition by a mobile robot. The description consists of a series of landmarks autonomously selected by the robot from a generalized panoramic view generated as a visual memory of scenes along routes. The basic idea to bridge the quantitative panoramic view to qualitative landmarks is to examine the distinctiveness of patterns in the image and select landmarks from unique patterns that are remarkable by which to navigate