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arXiv · 1509.06939

Enabling Depth-driven Visual Attention on the iCub Humanoid Robot: Instructions for Use and New Perspectives

Giulia Pasquale·Tanis Mar·Carlo Ciliberto·Lorenzo Rosasco·Lorenzo Natale
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Abstract

The importance of depth perception in the interactions that humans have within their nearby space is a well established fact. Consequently, it is also well known that the possibility of exploiting good stereo information would ease and, in many cases, enable, a large variety of attentional and interactive behaviors on humanoid robotic platforms. However, the difficulty of computing real-time and robust binocular disparity maps from moving stereo cameras often prevents from relying on this kind of cue to visually guide robots' attention and actions in real-world scenarios. The contribution of this paper is two-fold: first, we show that the Efficient Large-scale Stereo Matching algorithm (ELAS) by A. Geiger et al. 2010 for computation of the disparity map is well suited to be used on a humanoid robotic platform as the iCub robot; second, we show how, provided with a fast and reliable stereo system, implementing relatively challenging visual behaviors in natural settings can require much less effort. As a case of study we consider the common situation where the robot is asked to focus the attention on one object close in the scene, showing how a simple but effective disparity-based segmentation solves the problem in this case. Indeed this example paves the way to a variety of other similar applications.

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Giulia Pasquale, Tanis Mar, Carlo Ciliberto, Lorenzo Rosasco, Lorenzo Natale. 2015-09-23. Enabling Depth-driven Visual Attention on the iCub Humanoid Robot: Instructions for Use and New Perspectives. https://arxiv.org/abs/1509.06939

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