Vision-based Entrance Detection in Outdoor Scenes

Doors are a significant object for the visually impaired and robots to enter and exit buildings. Although the accuracy of door detection is reported high in indoor scenes, it has become a difficult problem in outdoor scenes in computer vision. The reason may lie in the fact that such properties of a simple ordinary door such as handles, corners, and the gap between the door and the ground may not be visible due to the great variety of doors in outdoor environments. In this paper, we present a vision-based method for detecting building entrances in outdoor images. After extracting the lines and deleting the extra ones, regions between the vertical lines are specified and the features including height, width, location, color, texture and the number of lines inside the regions are obtained. Finally, some additional knowledge such as door existence at the bottom of the image, a reasonable height and width of a door, the difference between color and texture of the doors and those of the neighboring regions, and numerous lines on doors is used to decide on door detection. The method was tested on eTRIMS dataset and our own dataset including doors of houses, apartments, and stores leading to acceptable results. The obtained results show that our approach outperforms comparable state-of-the-art approaches.