Detection of doors using a genetic visual fuzzy system for mobile robots

Abstract

Doors are common objects in indoor environments and their detection can be used in robotic tasks such as map-building, navigation and positioning. This work presents a new approach to door-detection in indoor environments using computer vision. Doors are found in gray-level images by detecting the borders of their architraves. A variation of the Hough Transform is used in order to extract the segments in the image after applying the Canny edge detector. Features like length, direction, or distance between segments are used by a fuzzy system to analyze whether the relationship between them reveals the existence of doors. The system has been designed to detect rectangular doors typical of many indoor environments by the use of expert knowledge. Besides, a tuning mechanism based on a genetic algorithm is proposed to improve the performance of the system according to the particularities of the environment in which it is going to be employed. A large database of images containing doors of our building, seen from different angles and distances, has been created to test the performance of the system before and after the tuning process. The system has shown the ability to detect rectangular doors under heavy perspective deformations and it is fast enough to be used for real-time applications in a mobile robot.

Automated exterior inspection of an aircraft with a pan-tilt-zoom camera mounted on a mobile robot

“…6(a)]. The problem of ROI detection is to a certain degree similar to the problem of edge-based door detection [25][26][27][28] with a monocular camera. Neither of the cited methods is fully applicable to our problem.…”

Approaches to Door Identification for Robot Navigation

“…However, most of the references we found are vision-based approaches (Seo et al, 2005) and focus on edge detection. Muñoz-Salinas et al (2005) present a visual door detection system that is based on the Canny edge detector and Hough transform to extract line segments from images. Another vision-based system for detection and traversal of doors is presented in (Eberset et al, 2000).…”

Omni-Directional Scanning Localization Method of a Mobile Robot Based on Ultrasonic Sensors

“…The types of sensors used in the localization of mobile robots include laser sensors [1,2,3], visional sensors [4,5,6], infrared sensors [7], RFID (Radio Frequency Identification Devices) [8] and ultrasonic sensors [9,10], which compared with other sensors is the most robust and low-cost distance detection device [11]. The sound waves emitted by an ultrasonic sensor encompasses a fan-shaped area, the angle of which is defined as the divergence angle, and all objects that fall within this region can be detected.…”