Obstacle Avoidance and Navigation in the Real World by a Seeing Robot Rover, Hans Moravec, 1980
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## Chapter 5: Interest Operator

The cart vision code deals with very simple primitive entities, localized regions called features. A feature is conceptually a point in the three dimensional world, but it is found by examining localities larger than points in pictures. A feature is good if it can be located unambiguously in different views of a scene. A uniformly colored region or a simple edge does not make for good features because its parts are indistinguishable. Regions, such as corners, with high contrast in orthogonal directions are best.

New features in images are picked by a subroutine called the interest operator, an example of whose operation is displayed in Figure 5-1. It tries to select a relatively uniform scattering, to maximize the probability that a few features will be picked on every visible object, and to choose areas that can be easily found in other images. Both goals are achieved by returning regions that are local maxima of a directional variance measure. Featureless areas and simple edges, which have no variance in the direction of the edge, are thus avoided.

Figure 5.1: A cart's eye view from the starting position of an obstacle run, and features picked out by the interest operator. They are labelled in order of decreasing interest measure.

Figure 5.2: A typical interest operator window, and the four sums calculated over it ($P_{I,J}$ are the pixel bightnesses). The interest measure of the window is the minimum of the four sums.

Figure 5.3: The twenty five overlapping windows considered in a local maximum decision. The smallest cells in the diagram are individual pixels. The four by four array of these in the center of the image is the window being considered as a local maximum. In order for it to be chosen as a feature to track, its interest measure must equal or exceed that of each of the other outlined four by four areas.

Directional variance is measured over small square windows. Sums of squares of differences of pixels adjacent in each of four directions (horizontal, vertical and two diagonals) over each window are calculated, and the window's interest measure is the minimum of these four sums.

Features are chosen where the interest measure has local maxima. The feature is conceptually the point at the center of the window with this locally maximal value.

This measure is evaluated on windows spaced half a window width apart over the entire image. A window is declared to contain an interesting feature if its variance measure is a local maximum, that is, if it has the largest value of the twenty five windows which overlap or contact it.

The variance measure depends on adjacent pixel differences and responds to high frequency noise in the image. The effects of noise are alleviated and the processing time is shortened by applying the operator to a reduced image. In the current program original images are 240 lines high by 256 pixels wide. The interest operator is applied to the 120 by 128 version, on windows 3 pixels square.

Figure 5.4: Another obstacle run interest operator application

Figure 5.5: More interest operating

The local maxima found are stored in an array, sorted in order of decreasing variance.

The entire process on a typical 260 by 240 image, using 6 by 6 windows takes about 75 milliseconds on the KL-10. The variance computation and local maximum test are coded in FAIL (our assembler) \ref(WG1), the maxima sorting and top level are in SAIL (an Algol-like language) \ref(R1).

Once a feature is chosen, its appearance is recorded as series of excerpts from the reduced image sequence. A window (6 by 6 in the current implementation) is excised around the feature's location from each of the variously reduced pictures. Only a tiny fraction of the area of the original (unreduced) image is extracted. Four times as much of the x2 reduced image is stored, sixteen times as much of the x4 reduction, and so on until at some level we have the whole image. The final result is a series of 6 by 6 pictures, beginning with a very blurry rendition of the whole picture, gradually zooming in linear expansions of two to a sharp closeup of the feature. Of course, it records the appearance correctly from only one point of view.

### Weaknesses

The interest operator has some fundamental limitations. The basic measure was chosen to reject simple edges and uniform areas. Edges are not suitable features for the correlator because the different parts of an edge are indistinguishable.

The measure is able to unambiguously reject edges only if they are oriented along the four directions of summation. Edges whose angle is an odd multiple of 22.5° give non-zero values for all four sums, and are sometimes incorrectly chosen as interesting.

The operator especially favors intersecting edges. These are sometimes corners or cracks in objects, and are very good. Sometimes they are caused by a distant object peering over the edge of a nearby one and then they are very bad. Such spurious intersections don't have a definite distance, and must be rejected during camera solving. In general they reduce the reliability of the system.

### Desirable Improvements

The operator has a fundamental and central role in the obstacle avoider, and is worth improving. Edge rejection at odd angles should be increased, maybe by generating sums in the 22.5° directions.

Rejecting near/far object intersections more reliably than the current implementation does is possible. An operator that recognized that the variance in a window was restricted to one side of an edge in that window would be a good start. Really good solutions to this problem are probably computationally much more expensive than my measure.

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