Outdoor Navigating Scene Labeling Using Importance Factor Based I-RELIEF and Feature Weighted Support Vector Machines

Feature selection plays an important role in terrain classification for outdoor robot navigation. For terrain classification, the image data usually have a large number of feature dimensions. The better selection of features usually results in higher labeling accuracy. In this work, a novel approach for terrain perception using Importance Factor based I-Relief algorithm and Feature Weighted Support Vector Machines (IFIR-FWSVM) is put forward. Firstly, the weight of each feature for classification is computed by using Importance Factor based I-Relief algorithm (IFIR) and the irrelevant features are eliminated. Then the weighted features are used to compute the kernel functions of SVM and trained the classifier. Finally, the trained SVM is employed to predict the terrain label in the far-field regions. Experimental results based on DARPA datasets show that the proposed method IFIR-FWSVM is superior over traditional SVM.