Qualitative route scene description using autonomous landmark detection

This paper introduces an approach to build 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 panoramic view, which has been 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 remarkably by which to navigate.>