Multi-scale saliency-guided compressive sensing approach to efficient robotic laser range measurements

Improving laser range data acquisition speed is important for many robotic applications such as mapping and localization. One approach to reducing acquisition time is to acquire laser range data through a dynamically small subset of measurement locations. The reconstruction can then be performed based on the concept of compressed sensing (CS), where a sparse signal representation allows for signal reconstruction at sub-Nyquist measurements. Motivated by this, a novel multi-scale saliency-guided CS-based algorithm is proposed for an efficient robotic laser range data acquisition for robotic vision. The proposed system samples the objects of interest through an optimized probability density function derived based on multi-scale saliency rather than the uniform random distribution used in traditional CS systems. Experimental results with laser range data from indoor and outdoor environments show that the proposed approach requires less than half the samples needed by existing CS-based approaches while maintaining the same reconstruction performance. In addition, the proposed method offers significant improvement in reconstruction SNR compared to current CS-based approaches.