Page 109 - Rapid Learning in Robotics

Chapter 7

Application Examples in the

Vision Domain

The PSOM algorithm has been explained in the previous chapters. In this
chapter a number of examples are presented which expose its applicability
in the vision domain. Vision is a sensory information source and plays an
increasingly important role as perception mechanism for robotics.

The parameterized associative map and its particular completion mech-
anism serves here for a number of interesting application possibilities. The
first example is concerned with the completion of an image feature set
found here in a 2 D image, invariant to translation and rotation of the im-
age. This idea can be generalized to a set of “virtual sensors”. A redundant
set of sensory information can be fused in order to improve recognition
confidence and measurement precision. Here the PSOM offers a natural
way of performing the fusion process in a flexible manner. As shown, this
can be useful for further tasks, e.g. for inter-sensor cooperation, and iden-
tifying the the object's 3 D spatial rotations and position. Furthermore, we
present also a more low-level vision application. By employing special-
ized feature filters, the PSOM can serve for identification of landmarks in
gray-scale images, here shown for fingertips.

7.1 2 D Image Completion

First we want to consider here a planar example. The task is to complete
a partial set of image feature locations, where the image can be translated

J. Walter “Rapid Learning in Robotics” 95