Robust vision-based monitoring of indoor environments by an autonomous mobile robot

This paper presents a novel vision-based approach for indoor environment monitoring by a mobile robot. The proposed system is based on computer vision methods to match the current scene with a stored one, looking for new or removed objects. The matching process uses both keypoint features and colour information. A PCA-SIFT algorithm is employed for feature extraction and matching. Colour-based segmentation is performed separately, using HSV coding. A fuzzy logic inference system is applied to fuse information from both steps and decide whether a significant variation of the scene has occurred. Results from experimental tests demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed method in robot surveillance applications.