Data- and model-driven attention mechanism for autonomous visual landmark acquisition

This paper presents a visual attention mechanism for the acquisition of landmarks in an arbitrary scene. The proposed mechanism consists of two consecutive selection stages. The first one employs classical preattentive saliency computations to select a reduced set of interest regions from the whole input image (data-driven stage). The second stage selects from the output of the first selection stage the region that can be considered as a potential landmark (model-driven stage). This potential landmark is the input of the attentive stage, that must characterize it and finally determine if this object is a real landmark. The used imaging sensor is a stereo vision system which is capable of providing depth data as well as color images. This stereo vision system is mounted on an autonomous mobile robot and serves map-building and localisation purposes. We present results achieved by applying the proposed visual attention scheme to on-line acquired stereo pairs of indoor and outdoor scenes.