The highly percipient nature of human mind in avoiding sensory overload is a crucial factor which gives human vision an advantage over machine vision, the latter has otherwise powerful computational resources at its disposal given today's technology. This stresses the need to focus on methods which extract a concise representation of the environment inorder to approach a complex problem such as visual mapping. This article is an attempt of creating a mapping system, which proposes an architecture that combines task-specific and saliency driven approaches. The proposed method is implemented on a warehouse robot. The proposed solution provide a priority framework which enables an industrial robot to build a concise visual representation of the environment. The method is evaluated on data collected by a RGBD sensor mounted on a fork-lift robot and shows promise for addressing visual mapping problems in industrial environments.

A novel region based 3D semantic mapping method is proposed for urban scenes. The proposed Semantic Urban Maps (SUM) method labels the regions of segmented images into a set of geometric and semantic classes simultaneously by employing a Markov Random Field based classification framework. The pixels in the labeled images are back-projected into a set of 3D point-clouds using stereo disparity. The point-clouds are registered together by incorporating the motion estimation and a coherent semantic map representation is obtained. SUM is evaluated on five urban benchmark sequences and is demonstrated to be successful in retrieving both geometric as well as semantic labels. The comparison with relevant state-of-art method reveals that SUM is competitive and performs better than the competing method in average pixel-wise accuracy.

The problem of robust extraction of ego-motion from a sequence of images for an eye-in-hand camera configuration is addressed. A novel approach toward solving planar template based tracking is proposed which performs a non-linear image alignment and a planar similarity optimization to recover camera transformations from planar regions of a scene. The planar region tracking problem as a motion optimization problem is solved by maximizing the similarity among the planar regions of a scene. The optimization process employs an evolutionary metaheuristic approach in order to address the problem within a large non-linear search space. The proposed method is validated on image sequences with real as well as synthetic image datasets and found to be successful in recovering the ego-motion. A comparative analysis of the proposed method with various other state-of-art methods reveals that the algorithm succeeds in tracking the planar regions robustly and is comparable to the state-of-the art methods. Such an application of evolutionary metaheuristic in solving complex visual navigation problems can provide different perspective and could help in improving already available methods.

The problem of robust and invariant representation of places is being addressed. A place recognition technique is proposed followed by an application to a semantic topological mapping. The proposed technique is evaluated on a robot localization database which consists of a large set of images taken under various weather conditions. The results show that the proposed method can robustly recognize the places and is invariant to geometric transformations, brightness changes and noise. The comparative analysis with the state-of-the-art semantic place description methods show that the method outperforms the competing methods and exhibits better average recognition rates.