Object recognition and pose estimation for robotic manipulation using color cooccurrence histograms

Robust techniques for object recognition, image segmentation and pose estimation are essential for robotic manipulation and grasping. We present a novel approach for object recognition and pose estimation based on color cooccurrence histograms (CCHs). Consequently, two problems addressed in this paper are i) robust recognition and segmentation of the object in the scene, and ii) object's pose estimation using an appearance based approach. The proposed recognition scheme is based on the CCHs used in a classical learning framework that facilitates a "winner-takes-all" strategy across different scales. The detected "windows of attention" are compared with training images of the object for which the pose is known. The orientation of the object is estimated as the weighted average among competitive poses, in which the weight increases proportional to the degree of matching between the training and the segmented image histograms. The major advantages of the proposed two-step appearance based method are its robustness and invariance towards scaling and translations. The method is also computationally efficient since both recognition and pose estimation rely on the same representation of the object