Active segmentation for robotics

The semantic robots of the immediate future are robots that will be able to find and recognize objects in any environment. They need the capability of segmenting objects in their visual field. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to segmentation based on the operation of fixation by an active observer. Our approach is different from current approaches: while existing works attempt to segment the whole scene at once into many areas, we segment only one image region, specifically the one containing the fixation point. Furthermore, our solution integrates monocular cues (color, texture) with binocular cues (stereo disparities and optical flow). Experiments with real imagery collected by our active robot and from the known databases demonstrate the promise of the approach.