Revision of Robot Vision Task from Mon, 02/22/2010 - 00:20

Welcome to the website of the 3rd edition of the Robot Vision challenge!

The third edition of the Robot Vision challenge is a continuation of two previous successful events. The RobotVision challenge was presented for the first time in 2009 and attracted considerable attention, with 7 participating groups and a total of 27 submitted runs. The second edition of the challenge was held in conjunction with ICPR 2010 and saw an increase in participation, with 9 participating groups and 34 submitted runs. As in case of the previous events, the challenge will address the problem of visual place classification, this time with a special focus on generalization.

Overview

The ability to represent knowledge about space and its position therein is crucial for a mobile robot. To this end, topological and semantic descriptions are gaining popularity for augmenting purely metric space representations. Enhancing the space representation to be more meaningful from the point of view of spatial reasoning and human-robot interaction have been at the forefront of the issues being addressed. Indeed, in the concrete case of indoor environments, the ability to understand the existing topological relations and associate semantics terms such as "corridor" or "office" with places, gives a much more intuitive idea of the position of the robot than global metric coordinates. Vision has become in the last years the preferred sensor for capturing this type of information, as a large share of the semantic description of a place is encoded in its visual appearance.

The third edition of the challenge will focus on the problem of visual place classification, with a special focus on generalization. Participants will be asked to classify rooms and functional areas on the basis of image sequences, captured by a stereo camera mounted on a mobile robot within an office environment. The test sequence will be acquired within the same building but at a different floor than the training sequence. It will contain rooms of the same categorical type ("corridor", "office", "bathroom") and it will also contain room categories not seen in the training sequence ("meeting room", "library"). The system built by participants should be able to answer the question "where are you?" when presented with a test sequence imaging a room category seen during training, and it should be able to answer "I do not know this category" when presented with a new room category.

Acquisition of the database used for the challenge.

Organizers

• Andrzej Pronobis, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden, pronobis@csc.kth.se
• Barbara Caputo, IDIAP Research Institute, Martigny, Switzerland, bcaputo@idiap.ch
• Henrik I. Christensen, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA, hic@cc.gatech.edu
• Marco Fornoni, IDIAP Research Institute, Martigny, Switzerland, mfornoni@idiap.ch

Contact person

Should you have any questions regarding the contest, please contact Andrzej Pronobis.

Important dates

• 22.02.2010 - Registration open for all CLEF tasks
• 31.03.2010 - Training and validation data and task release
• 31.05.2010 - Test data release
• 15.06.2010 - Submission of runs
• 08.07.2010 - Release of results
• 30.07.2010 - Submission of working notes papers to the workshop
• 22.10.2010 - IROS workshop (tentative)

How to register for the task

Due to database restrictions it is necessary to sign a user agreement. Please print the document, sign it and send it via fax to Henning Müller. (For detailed instructions see the explanation in the document). Finally, to register, please use the registration system available here. Registration is free of charge. If you already have a login from the ImageCLEF 2009 or the ICPR competition you can migrate it to ImageCLEF 2010 here.