Active object recognition

The concept of active object recognition is introduced, and a proposal for its solution is described. The camera is mounted on the end of a robot arm on a mobile base. The system exploits the mobility of the camera by using low-level image data to drive the camera to a standard viewpoint with respect to an unknown object. From such a viewpoint, the object recognition task is reduced to a two-dimensional pattern recognition problem. The system uses an efficient tree-based, probabilistic indexing scheme to find the model object that is likely to have generated the observed data, and for line tracking uses a modification of the token-based tracking scheme of J.L. Crowley et al. (1988). The system has been successfully tested on a set of origami objects. Given sufficiently accurate low-level data, recognition time is expected to grow only logarithmically with the number of objects stored.<>