Homing by Parameterized Scene Matching

In visual homing tasks, animals as well as robots can compute their movements from the current view and a snapshot taken at a home position. Solving this problem exactly would require knowledge about the distances to visible landmarks, information, which is not directly available to passive vision systems. We propose a homing scheme that dispenses with accurate distance information by using parameterized disparity fields. These are obtained from an approximation that incorporates prior knowledge about perspective distortions of the visual environment. A mathematical analysis proves that the approximation does not prevent the scheme from approaching the goal with arbitrary accuracy. Mobile robot experiments are used to demonstrate the practical feasibility of the approach.