Salience detection for vision-based robot navigation

This paper presents a new approach to detect salient regions in an image. A number of units is used to respond to the most salient regions, adapting their response to the size and range of colors present in each region. The system can be directly used on a sequence of images, continuously adapting its output with time. A quality estimation of each unit allows to select the most relevant regions present in the image at any time. Experiments performed on test images showing a robust behavior of the system are presented. The output of this process can be used in a visual landmark-based navigation system to determine what parts of the image should be explored to find the most useful landmarks.