Toward Holistic Scene Understanding: A Transfer of Human Scene Perception to Mobile Robots

The long-term vision for robotics is to have fully autonomous mobile robots that perceive the environment as humans do or even better. This article transfers the core ideas from human scene perception onto robot scene perception to contribute toward a holistic scene understanding of robots. The first contribution is to extensively survey and compare state-of-the-art robot scene perception approaches with neuroscience theories and studies of human perception. A step-by-step transfer of the perceptual process reveals similarities and differences between robots and humans. The second contribution represents an analysis of the status quo of holistic robot perception approaches to extract to what extent the perceptual capabilities of humans have been reached. Building on this, the gaps and potentials of robot perception are illustrated to address future research directions.