Informed visual search:: Combining attention and object recognition

This paper studies the sequential object recognition problem faced by a mobile robot searching for specific objects within a cluttered environment. In contrast to current state-of-the-art object recognition solutions which are evaluated on databases of static images, the system described in this paper employs an active strategy based on identifying potential objects using an attention mechanism and planning to obtain images of these objects from numerous viewpoints. We demonstrate the use of a bag-of-features technique for ranking potential objects, and show that this measure outperforms geometric matching for invariance across viewpoints. Our system implements informed visual search by prioritising map locations and re-examining promising locations first. Experimental results demonstrate that our system is a highly competent object recognition system that is capable of locating numerous challenging objects amongst distractors.