Landmark identification and tracking in natural environment

This paper deals with the development of the use of visual function in order to add useful information for tasks of a mobile robot roving in natural environments. We have proposed and implemented the nominative region model which indicates every region's nature in an image. A color segmentation algorithm provides a synthetic description of the scene. Regions obtained from the segmentation stage are then characterized by their color and texture and afterwards identified in order to obtain their nature (grass, rocks, ...). Probabilistic methods are used to determine the nature of current elements in the environment. Then, one specific landmark is chosen according to its nature and shape and this representation is tracked through an image sequence.