Using image gradient as a visual feature for visual servoing

Direct photometric visual servoing has proved to be an efficient approach for robot positioning. Instead of using classical geometric features such as points, straight lines, pose or an homography, as it is usually done, information provided by all pixels in the image are considered. In the past mainly luminance information has been considered. In this paper, considering that most of the useful information in an image is located in its high frequency areas (that are contours), we have consider various possible combinations of global visual feature based on luminance and gradient. Experimental results are presented to show the behavior of such features.