Real-time cooperative image processing for interactive environment understanding

A real-time cooperative image processing method that enables interactive understanding of the environment is proposed for use in intelligent teleoperation systems. An object recognition process for interactive environmental map building is developed by combining simple independent recognition agents with a cooperation mechanism to achieve real-time data acquisition in a changing environment. The cooperation mechanism is obtained by designing each independent agent to work recursively while referring to a common object model. This method provides a flexible recognition process that interactively produces useful results, even from complicated environment scenes. The proposed method is shown to work successfully.<>