Patent ID: 7421092

Claim:
A situation recognition apparatus that recognizes a current situation by using optical information, the apparatus comprising: an optical information acquisition unit configured to acquire first optical information and second optical information about an external environment; a storage configured to store the first optical information in an image archive comprising optical information about the external environment; a processing unit configured to determine whether the second optical information is a redundant copy of the first optical information based on either a dissimilarity or a time interval between the first optical information and the second optical information, wherein the second optical information is stored in the image archive if the dissimilarity or the time interval surpasses a threshold; the storage being configured to store a probabilistic model, constructed from optical information in the image archive, that numerically represents transitions between optical information in the image archive; wherein the processing unit includes; a difference calculation section that calculates values indicative of the differences between the second optical information and optical information in the image archive; a difference storage section that stores the calculated values in time order; and a matching processing section that determines whether the second optical information matches any of the optical information in the image archive by determining a correspondence between a sequence of values stored in the difference storage section and the probabilistic model; and an output unit configured to output a result of the matching.