Revision of Robot Vision Task from Sun, 04/25/2010 - 17:29

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.

News

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.

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.

Important dates

• 22.02.2010 - Registration open for all CLEF tasks
• 30.04.2010 - Training and validation data and task release
• 15.06.2010 - Test data release
• 30.06.2010 - 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.

The Task

Data Set

Characteristics of the Data

The image sequences used for the contest are taken from the previously unreleased COLD-Stockholm database. The sequences were acquired using the MobileRobots PowerBot robot platform equipped with a stereo camera system consisting of two Prosilica GC1380C cameras. Please note that either monocular or stereo vision system can be used in the contest. Download links for the sequences are available below. The acquisition was performed on three different floors of an office environment, consisting of 36 areas (usually corresponding to separate rooms) belonging to 12 different semantic and functional categories. The robot was manually driven through the environment while continuously acquiring images at a rate of 5fps. Each data sample was then labeled as belonging to one of the areas according to the position of the robot during acquisition (rather than contents of the images). The video below presents the acquisition procedure as well as parts of image sequences showing the interiors of the rooms and variations captured in the images. Acquisition of the COLD-Stockholm Database

Image Sequences

Each image sequence is stored as a set of JPEG files in a separate TAR archive. Windows users can use one of the free archive managers such as PeaZip to decompress the archives. Complete information about each image is encoded in its filename. The naming convention used to generate the image filenames is explained below: {frame_number}_{camera}_{area_id}_{area_category}.jpeg

• {frame_number} - Number of the frame in the sequence
• {camera} - Indicates the camera used to acquire the image ('Left' or 'Right')
• {area_id} - Label indicating the ID of the area in which the image was acquired.
• {area_category} - Label indicating the category of the area in which the image was acquired.

Additional Resources

The camera calibration data are available for the stereo image sequences. The camera calibration has been performed for both cameras independently and within the stereo setup using the Camera Calibration Toolbox for Matlab. The calibration data are stored within Matlab .mat files as produced by the toolbox. The data are available for download compressed using ZIP or Tar/Gz.