Overview of the ImageCLEF 2013 robot vision task

This article describes the RobotVision@ImageCLEF 2013 challenge, which addresses two problems: place classification and object recognition. Participants of the challenge were asked to classify rooms on the basis of image sequences captured by cameras mounted on a mobile robot. They were also asked to detect the appearance or lack of several objects. The proposals of the participants had to answer two questions: \where are you?" (I am in the elevator, in the toilet, etc.) and \which objects can you see?" (I can see a table and a chair but not a computer) when presented with a test sequence. The number of times a specific set of object appears in a frame was not considered but if they appeared or not in it. The test sequence was acquired within the same environment but with different lighting conditions than the training sequences. The main novelty of the 2013 edition of the task is the object recognition problem. For both problems: place classification and object recognition, depth and visual images were provided. Moreover, participants were allowed to take advantage from the temporal continuity of the test sequence. The winner of the 2013 edition of the Robot Vision task was the MIAR ICT group, from China.