Representing and evaluating ultrasonic maps using active snake contours and Kohonen's self-organizing feature maps
Author
Altun, K.
Barshan, B.
Date
2010-05-04Source Title
Autonomous Robots
Print ISSN
0929-5593
Publisher
Springer
Volume
29
Issue
2
Pages
151 - 168
Language
English
Type
ArticleItem Usage Stats
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Abstract
Active snake contours and Kohonen's self-organizing feature maps (SOMs) are employed for representing and evaluating discrete point maps of indoor environments efficiently and compactly. A generic error criterion is developed for comparing two different sets of points based on the Euclidean distance measure. The point sets can be chosen as (i) two different sets of map points acquired with different mapping techniques or different sensing modalities, (ii) two sets of fitted curve points to maps extracted by different mapping techniques or sensing modalities, or (iii) a set of extracted map points and a set of fitted curve points. The error criterion makes it possible to compare the accuracy of maps obtained with different techniques among themselves, as well as with an absolute reference. Guidelines for selecting and optimizing the parameters of active snake contours and SOMs are provided using uniform sampling of the parameter space and particle swarm optimization (PSO A demonstrative example from ultrasonic mapping is given based on experimental data and compared with a very accurate laser map, considered an absolute reference. Both techniques can fill the erroneous gaps in discrete point maps. Snake curve fitting results in more accurate maps than SOMs because it is more robust to outliers. The two methods and the error criterion are sufficiently general that they can also be applied to discrete point maps acquired with other mapping techniques and other sensing modalities.
Keywords
Active contoursAutonomous robots
Error criterion
Kohonen's self-organizing feature map
Laser range finders
Map errors
Mapping
Parameter optimization
Parameter selection
Particle swarm optimization
Range sensing
Snakes
Time-of-flight measurements
Ultrasonic sensing