An object recognition method based on depth information for an indoor mobile robot

In this paper, an object recognition method based on the depth information from the RGB-D camera, Xtion, is proposed for an indoor mobile robot. First, the RANdom SAmple Consensus (RANSAC) algorithm is applied to the point cloud obtained from the RGB-D camera to detect and remove the floor points. Next, the removed point cloud is classified by the k-means clustering method as each object's point cloud, and the normal vector of each point is obtained by using the k-d tree search. The obtained normal vectors are classified by the trained multi-layer perceptron as 18 classes and used as features for object recognition. To distinguish an object from another object, the similarity between them is measured by using Levenshtein distance. To verify the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed object recognition method, the experiments are carried out with several similar boxes.