This paper 1 describes the use of two artificial intelligence methods for object
recognition via pressure images from a high-resolution tactile sensor. Both meth-
ods follow the same procedure of feature extraction and posterior classification
based on a supervised Supported Vector Machine (SVM). The two approaches
differ on how features are extracted: while the first one uses the Speeded-Up
Robust Features (SURF) descriptor, the other one employs a pre-trained Deep
Convolutional Neural Network (DCNN). Besides, this work shows its applica-
tion to object recognition for rescue robotics, by distinguishing between differ-
ent body parts and inert objects. The performance analysis of the proposed
methods is carried out with an experiment with 5-class non-human and 3-class
human classification, providing a comparison in terms of accuracy and compu-tational load. Finally, it is discussed how feature-extraction based on SURF can be obtained up to five times faster compared to DCNN. On the other hand, the
accuracy achieved using DCNN-based feature extraction can be 11.67% superior
to SURF.