Automatic Labeling of Natural Landmarks for Wheelchair Motion Planning

Abstract

Labeling landmarks for the mobile plan of the automatic electric wheelchair is essential, because it can assist disabled people. In particular, labeled landmark images will help the wheelchairs to locate landmarks and move more accurately and safely. Here, we propose an automatic detection of natural landmarks in RGBD images for navigation of mobile platforms in an indoor environment. This method can reduce the time for manually collecting and creating a dataset of landmarks. The wheelchair, equipped with a camera system, is allowed to move along corridors to detect and label natural landmarks automatically. These landmarks contain the camera and wheelchair positions with the 3D coordinates when storing the labeled landmark. The feature density method is comprised of Oriented FAST and Rotated BRIEF (ORB) feature extractors. Moreover, the central coordinates of the marked points in the obtained RGB images will be mapped to the images with the depth axis for determining the position of the RGB-D camera system in the spatial domain. An encoder and kinematics equations are applied to determine the position during movement. As expected, the system shows good results, such as a high IoU value of over 0.8 at a distance of less than 2 m and a fast time of 41.66 ms for object detection. This means that our technique is very effective for the automatic movement of the wheelchair.