Mutual information-based visual servoing

Amaury Dame (1) , Eric Marchand (1)

1 Lagadic - Visual servoing in robotics, computer vision, and augmented reality

In this work we propose a new information theoretic approach to achieve visual servoing directly utilizing the information (as defined by Shannon) contained in the images. A metric derived from information theory, mutual information, is considered. Mutual information is widely used in multi-modal image registration since it is insensitive to changes in the lighting condition and to a wide class of non-linear image transformation. In this paper mutual-information is used as a new visual feature for visual servoing which allows us to build a new control law that can control the 6 degrees of freedom of a robot. Among various advantages, this approach does not require any matching nor tracking step, is robust to large illumination variation and allows consideration of different image modalities within the same task. Experiments on a real robot demonstrate the significance of this work on visual servoing tasks.

Mots clés: Visual Servoing

Domaines: Robotique [cs.RO]; Informatique [cs]

Amaury Dame, Eric Marchand. Mutual information-based visual servoing. IEEE Transactions on Robotics, 2011, 27 (5), pp.958-969. ⟨hal-00639674⟩