Line image signature for scene understanding with a wearable vision system

Wearable computer vision systems provide plenty of opportunities to develop human assistive devices. This work contributes on visual scene understanding techniques using a helmet-mounted omnidirectional vision system. The goal is to extract semantic information of the environment, such as the type of environment being traversed or the basic 3D layout of the place, to build assistive navigation systems. We propose a novel line-based image global descriptor that encloses the structure of the scene observed. This descriptor is designed with omnidirectional imagery in mind, where observed lines are longer than in conventional images. Our experiments show that the proposed descriptor can be used for indoor scene recognition comparing its results to state-of-the-art global descriptors. Besides, we demonstrate additional advantages of particular interest for wearable vision systems: higher robustness to rotation, compactness, and easier integration with other scene understanding steps.