This object detection is fairly reliable, but sometimes fails if the robot approaches an object with a sharp corner.
Software: CBSystem developed by Team CajunBot does everything from object detection to path planning.
Well-researched domains of object detection include face detection and pedestrian detection.
Another algorithm by D. Hoiem et al. makes use of contextual information in the form of camera height and scene geometry to prune object detection.
Fills in the vulnerability region associated with pulse-amplitude time-domain radar for small object detection near terrain and weather.
The study indicates that an object's contrast against the background, rather than colour, may be more important for object detection.
They did have automatic object detection working, but no starfield matching at that time.
As such, they bear some resemblance to Haar basis functions, which have been used previously in the realm of image-based object detection.
It has pretty good automatic object detection, including support for multiple objects, obviating the need to manually crop items.
VIRAT will utilize what is currently available for object detection.