Assessing map quality using conditional random fields

This paper is concerned with assessing the quality of work-space maps. While there has been much work in recent years on building maps of field settings, little attention has been given to endowing a machine with introspective competencies which would allow assessing the reliability/ plausibility of the representation. We classify regions in 3D point-cloud maps into two binary classes - "plausible" or "suspicious". In this paper we concentrate on the classification of urban maps and use a Conditional Random Fields to model the intrinsic qualities of planar patches and crucially, their relationship to each other. A bipartite labelling of the map is acquired via application of the Graph Cut algorithm. We present results using data gathered by a mobile robot equipped with a 3D laser range sensor while operating in a typical urban setting. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg