UbiRo: An interactive device supporting object registration and recognition of service robots

Abstract

This paper introduces an interactive device called "UbiRo" that is a convenient device for object registration and recognition of service robots. To register the objects with computer vision, user needs to cut the object off from its background on an image that is taken for the registration process. Taking images and segmenting the object from the images by user can be a time taking and unpleasant work. To solve this problem, we use a new computer vision interface that combines a user's simple gesture and computer vision. We call it `interactive computer vision' and the technique is applied to UbiRo. With UbiRo, users can effectively segment the object from the images taken and control the mouse pointer on display of robot to make the registration easy. The same interactive computer vision is also effective for object recognition. We present here the results on two experiments of object recognition and an additional usability test for controlling mouse pointer with UbiRo.