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      • Bilkent Theses
      • Theses - Department of Computer Engineering
      • Dept. of Computer Engineering - Master's degree
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      Detection of tree trunks as visual landmarks in outdoor environments

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      Author(s)
      Yıldız, Tuğba
      Advisor
      Saranlı, Uluç
      Date
      2010
      Publisher
      Bilkent University
      Language
      English
      Type
      Thesis
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      Abstract
      One of the basic problems to be addressed for a robot navigating in an outdoor environment is the tracking of its position and state. A fundamental first step in using algorithms for solving this problem, such as various visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) strategies, is the extraction and identification of suitable stationary “landmarks” in the environment. This is particularly challenging in the outdoors geometrically consistent features such as lines are not frequent. In this thesis, we focus on using trees as persistent visual landmark features in outdoor settings. Existing work to this end only uses intensity information in images and does not work well in low-contrast settings. In contrast, we propose a novel method to incorporate both color and intensity information as well as regional attributes in an image towards robust of detection of tree trunks. We describe both extensions to the well-known edge-flow method as well as complementary Gabor-based edge detection methods to extract dominant edges in the vertical direction. The final stages of our algorithm then group these vertical edges into potential tree trunks using the integration of perceptual organization and all available image features. We characterize the detection performance of our algorithm for two different datasets, one homogeneous dataset with different images of the same tree types and a heterogeneous dataset with images taken from a much more diverse set of trees under more dramatic variations in illumination, viewpoint and background conditions. Our experiments show that our algorithm correctly finds up to 90% of trees with a false-positive rate lower than 15% in both datasets. These results establish that the integration of all available color, intensity and structure information results in a high performance tree trunk detection system that is suitable for use within a SLAM framework that outperforms other methods that only use image intensity information.
      Keywords
      Edge detection, perceptual grouping, color, Gabor wavelets,
      Object detection
      Tree trunk detection
      Visual landmarks
      Visual SLAM
      Computer vision
      Pattern recognition
      Image processing
      Perceptual grouping
      Gabor wavelets
      Permalink
      http://hdl.handle.net/11693/15164
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      • Dept. of Computer Engineering - Master's degree 566
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