Segmentation of Indoor Daily Living Environments into Regions Used for Different Purposes.

This article discusses the segmentation of indoor daily living environments, such as rooms in a house, into regions that are habitually used for different purposes by the residents living in the environment. Because these regions usually include purpose-related furnishings, previous studies have focused on the functionalities of these furnishings or their predefined parts to characterize the purposes of the regions, including those furnishings used by the residents. However, the regions used for specific purposes do not necessarily correspond to the furnishings or their predefined parts. Even for a single dining table, its central area typically serves as the region used for placing food, drink, salt shakers etc., whereas the peripheral area typically constitutes a region for dining together. This article attempts to extract the regions used for different purposes as a spatial range from the given environment by segmenting it based on the similarity in the variation of postures observed in each position and the occupancy of its surrounding space. In the experiments using two datasets for indoor daily living environments observed by RGB-D cameras, the obtained regions primarily correspond to our understanding of the regions used for different purposes.