A Novel Generic Ball Recognition Algorithm Based on Omnidirectional Vision for Soccer Robots

It is significant for the final goal of RoboCup to realize the recognition of generic balls for soccer robots. In this paper, a novel generic ball recognition algorithm based on omnidirectional vision is proposed by combining the modified Haar-like features and AdaBoost learning algorithm. The algorithm is divided into offline training and online recognition. During the phase of offline training, numerous sub-images are acquired from various panoramic images, including generic balls, and then the modified Haar-like features are extracted from them and used as the input of the AdaBoost learning algorithm to obtain a classifier. During the phase of online recognition, and according to the imaging characteristics of our omnidirectional vision system, rectangular windows are defined to search for the generic ball along the rotary and radial directions in the panoramic image, and the learned classifier is used to judge whether a ball is included in the window. After the ball has been recognized globally, ball tracking is realized by integrating a ball velocity estimation algorithm to reduce the computational cost. The experimental results show that good performance can be achieved using our algorithm, and that the generic ball can be recognized and tracked effectively