Door detection with door handle recognition based on contour image and support vector machine

A door can serve as a feature for place classification and localization for navigation of a mobile robot in indoor environments. This paper proposes a door detection method based on the recognition of various door handles using the general Hough transform (GHT) and support vector machine (SVM). The contour and color histogram of a door handle extracted from the database are used in GHT and SVM, respectively. The door recognition scheme consists of four steps. The first step determines the region of interest (ROI) images defined by the color information and the environment around the door handle for stable recognition. In the second step, the door handle is recognized using the GHT method from the ROI image and the image patches are extracted from the position of the recognized door handle. In the third step, the extracted patch is classified whether it is the image patch of a door handle or not using the SVM classifier. The door position is probabilistically determined by the recognized door handle. Experimental results show that the proposed method can recognize various door handles and detect doors in a robust manner.