Paper Info
Title
Biologically Plausible Visual Homing Methods Based On Optical Flow Techniques
Abstract
Insects are able to return to important places in their environment by storing an image of the surroundings while at the goal, and later computing a home direction from a matching between this 'snapshot' image and the currently perceived image. Very similar ideas are pursued for the visual navigation of mobile robots. A wide range of different solutions for the matching between the two images have been suggested. This paper explores the application of optical flow techniques for visual homing. The performance of five different flow techniques and a reference method is analysed based on image collections from three different indoor environments. We show that block matching, two simple variants of block matching and two even simpler differential techniques produce robust homing behaviour, despite the simplicity of the matched features. Our analysis reveals that visual homing can succeed even in the presence of many incorrect feature correspondences, and that low-frequency features are sufficient for homing. In particular, the successful application of differential methods opens new vistas on the visual homing problem, both as plausible and parsimonious models of visual insect navigation, and as a starting point for novel robot navigation methods.
Year
DOI
Venue
2005
10.1080/09540090500140958
CONNECTION SCIENCE
Keywords
Field
DocType
robotics, navigation, optical flow, biological plausibility
Homing (biology),Computer vision,Computer science,Visual navigation,Visual homing,Artificial intelligence,Artificial neural network,Optical flow,Snapshot (computer storage),Robotics,Mobile robot
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
17
1-2
0954-0091
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
52
2.52
28
Authors
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Andrew Vardy114012.65
Ralf Möller22421298.04