Autonomous detection of indoor and outdoor signs

Steven Holden; Magnus Snorrason; Thomas Goodsell; Mark R. Stevens

doi:10.1117/12.604181

27 May 2005 Autonomous detection of indoor and outdoor signs

Steven Holden, Magnus Snorrason, Thomas Goodsell, Mark R. Stevens

Proceedings Volume 5804, Unmanned Ground Vehicle Technology VII; (2005) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.604181
Event: Defense and Security, 2005, Orlando, Florida, United States

Abstract

Most goal-oriented mobile robot tasks involve navigation to one or more known locations. This is generally done using GPS coordinates and landmarks outdoors, or wall-following and fiducial marks indoors. Such approaches ignore the rich source of navigation information that is already in place for human navigation in all man-made environments: signs. A mobile robot capable of detecting and reading arbitrary signs could be tasked using directions that are intuitive to hu-mans, and it could report its location relative to intuitive landmarks (a street corner, a person's office, etc.). Such ability would not require active marking of the environment and would be functional in the absence of GPS. In this paper we present an updated version of a system we call Sign Understanding in Support of Autonomous Navigation (SUSAN). This system relies on cues common to most signs, the presence of text, vivid color, and compact shape. By not relying on templates, SUSAN can detect a wide variety of signs: traffic signs, street signs, store-name signs, building directories, room signs, etc. In this paper we focus on the text detection capability. We present results summarizing probability of detection and false alarm rate across many scenes containing signs of very different designs and in a variety of lighting conditions.

Citation Download Citation

Steven Holden, Magnus Snorrason, Thomas Goodsell, and Mark R. Stevens "Autonomous detection of indoor and outdoor signs", Proc. SPIE 5804, Unmanned Ground Vehicle Technology VII, (27 May 2005); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.604181

ACCESS THE FULL ARTICLE

INSTITUTIONAL
Select your institution to access the SPIE Digital Library.

SELECT YOUR INSTITUTION

PERSONAL
Sign in with your SPIE account to access your personal subscriptions or to use specific features such as save to my library, sign up for alerts, save searches, etc.

PERSONAL SIGN IN

No SPIE Account? Create one

PURCHASE THIS CONTENT

SUBSCRIBE TO DIGITAL LIBRARY

50 downloads per 1-year subscription

Members: $195

Non-members: $335 ADD TO CART

25 downloads per 1 - year subscription

Members: $145

Non-members: $250 ADD TO CART

PURCHASE SINGLE ARTICLE

Includes PDF, HTML & Video, when available