• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SC
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• v.48 no.6
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• pp.91-98
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• 2011

This paper proposes an efficient and accurate vision based recognition and tracking framework for texture free objects. We approached this problem with a two phased algorithm: detection phase and tracking phase. In the detection phase, the algorithm extracts shape context descriptors that used for classifying objects into predetermined interesting targets. Later on, the matching result is further refined by a minimization technique. In the tracking phase, we resorted to meanshift tracking algorithm based on Bhattacharyya coefficient measurement. In summary, the contributions of our methods for the underwater robot vision are four folds: 1) Our method can deal with camera motion and scale changes of objects in underwater environment; 2) It is inexpensive vision based recognition algorithm; 3) The advantage of shape based method compared to a distinct feature point based method (SIFT) in the underwater environment with possible turbidity variation; 4) We made a quantitative comparison of our method with a few other well-known methods. The result is quite promising for the map based underwater SLAM task which is the goal of our research.