Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) trained on large scale RGB databases have become the secret sauce in the majority of recent approaches for object categorization from RGB-D data. Thanks to colorization techniques, these methods exploit the filters learned from 2D images to extract meaningful representations in 2.5D. Still, the perceptual signature of these two kind of images is very different, with the first usually strongly characterized by textures, and the second mostly by silhouettes of objects. Ideally, one would like to have two CNNs, one for RGB and one for depth, each trained on a suitable data collection, able to capture the perceptual properties of each channel for the task at hand. This has not been possible so far, due to the lack of a suitable depth database. This paper addresses this issue, proposing to opt for synthetically generated images rather than collecting by hand a 2.5D large scale database. While being clearly a proxy for real data, synthetic images allow to trade quality for quantity, making it possible to generate a virtually infinite amount of data. We show that the filters learned from such data collection, using the very same architecture typically used on visual data, learns very different filters, resulting in depth features (a) able to better characterize the different facets of depth images, and (b) complementary with respect to those derived from CNNs pre-trained on 2D datasets. Experiments on two publicly available databases show the power of our approach.
Object recognition from RGB-D data traditionally relied on hand-crafted features such as SIFT @cite_14 and spin images @cite_9 , combined together through vector quantization in a Bag-of-Words encoding @cite_9 . This heuristic approach has been surpassed by end-to-end feature learning architectures, able to define suitable features in a data-driven fashion @cite_4 @cite_21 @cite_28 . All these methods have been designed to cope with a limited amount of training data (of the order of @math depth images), thus they are able to only partially exploit the generalization abilities of deep learning as feature extractors experienced in the computer vision community @cite_1 @cite_6 , where databases of @math RGB images like ImageNet @cite_17 or Places @cite_0 are available.
@cite_14 @cite_4 @cite_28 @cite_9 @cite_21 @cite_1 @cite_6 @cite_0 @cite_17
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In this work we address joint object category and instance recognition in the context of RGB-D (depth) cameras. Motivated by local distance learning, where a novel view of an object is compared to individual views of previously seen objects, we define a view-to-object distance where a novel view is compared simultaneously to all views of a previous object. This novel distance is based on a weighted combination of feature differences between views. We show, through jointly learning per-view weights, that this measure leads to superior classification performance on object category and instance recognition. More importantly, the proposed distance allows us to find a sparse solution via Group-Lasso regularization, where a small subset of representative views of an object is identified and used, with the rest discarded. This significantly reduces computational cost without compromising recognition accuracy. We evaluate the proposed technique, Instance Distance Learning (IDL), on the RGB-D Object Dataset, which consists of 300 object instances in 51 everyday categories and about 250,000 views of objects with both RGB color and depth. We empirically compare IDL to several alternative state-of-the-art approaches and also validate the use of visual and shape cues and their combination. In this paper, we address the problems of contour detection, bottom-up grouping, object detection and semantic segmentation on RGB-D data. We focus on the challenging setting of cluttered indoor scenes, and evaluate our approach on the recently introduced NYU-Depth V2 (NYUD2) dataset (, ECCV, 2012). We propose algorithms for object boundary detection and hierarchical segmentation that generalize the @math gPb-ucm approach of (TPAMI, 2011) by making effective use of depth information. We show that our system can label each contour with its type (depth, normal or albedo). We also propose a generic method for long-range amodal completion of surfaces and show its effectiveness in grouping. We train RGB-D object detectors by analyzing and computing histogram of oriented gradients on the depth image and using them with deformable part models (, TPAMI, 2010). We observe that this simple strategy for training object detectors significantly outperforms more complicated models in the literature. We then turn to the problem of semantic segmentation for which we propose an approach that classifies superpixels into the dominant object categories in the NYUD2 dataset. We design generic and class-specific features to encode the appearance and geometry of objects. We also show that additional features computed from RGB-D object detectors and scene classifiers further improves semantic segmentation accuracy. In all of these tasks, we report significant improvements over the state-of-the-art. This paper addresses the problem of RGBD object recognition in real-world applications, where large amounts of annotated training data are typically unavailable. To overcome this problem, we propose a novel, weakly-supervised learning architecture (DCNN-GPC) which combines parametric models (a pair of Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNN) for RGB and D modalities) with non-parametric models (Gaussian Process Classification). Our system is initially trained using a small amount of labeled data, and then automatically prop- agates labels to large-scale unlabeled data. We first run 3D- based objectness detection on RGBD videos to acquire many unlabeled object proposals, and then employ DCNN-GPC to label them. As a result, our multi-modal DCNN can be trained end-to-end using only a small amount of human annotation. Finally, our 3D-based objectness detection and multi-modal DCNN are integrated into a real-time detection and recognition pipeline. In our approach, bounding-box annotations are not required and boundary-aware detection is achieved. We also propose a novel way to pretrain a DCNN for the depth modality, by training on virtual depth images projected from CAD models. We pretrain our multi-modal DCNN on public 3D datasets, achieving performance comparable to state-of-the-art methods on Washington RGBS Dataset. We then finetune the network by further training on a small amount of annotated data from our novel dataset of industrial objects (nuclear waste simulants). Our weakly supervised approach has demonstrated to be highly effective in solving a novel RGBD object recognition application which lacks of human annotations. Over the last decade, the availability of public image repositories and recognition benchmarks has enabled rapid progress in visual object category and instance detection. Today we are witnessing the birth of a new generation of sensing technologies capable of providing high quality synchronized videos of both color and depth, the RGB-D (Kinect-style) camera. With its advanced sensing capabilities and the potential for mass adoption, this technology represents an opportunity to dramatically increase robotic object recognition, manipulation, navigation, and interaction capabilities. In this paper, we introduce a large-scale, hierarchical multi-view object dataset collected using an RGB-D camera. The dataset contains 300 objects organized into 51 categories and has been made publicly available to the research community so as to enable rapid progress based on this promising technology. This paper describes the dataset collection procedure and introduces techniques for RGB-D based object recognition and detection, demonstrating that combining color and depth information substantially improves quality of results. For the task of RGB-D object recognition, it is important to identify suitable representations of images, which can boost the performance of object recognition. In this work, we propose a novel representation learning method for RGB-D images by jointly incorporating the underlying data structure and the prior knowledge of the data. Specifically, the convolutional neural networks (CNN) are employed to learn image representation by exploiting the underlying data structure. To handle the problem of the limited RGB and depth images for object recognition, the multi-level hierarchies of features trained on ImageNet from the CNN are transferred to learn rich generic feature representation for RGB and depth images while the labeled images are leveraged. On the other hand, we propose a novel deep auto-encoders (DAE) to exploit the prior knowledge, which can overcome the expensive computational cost of optimization in feature encoding. The expected representations of images are obtained by integrating the two types of image representations. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, we thoroughly conduct extensive experiments on two publicly available RGB-D datasets. The encouraging experimental results compared with the state-of-the-art approaches demonstrate the advantages of the proposed method. We address the problems of contour detection, bottom-up grouping and semantic segmentation using RGB-D data. We focus on the challenging setting of cluttered indoor scenes, and evaluate our approach on the recently introduced NYU-Depth V2 (NYUD2) dataset [27]. We propose algorithms for object boundary detection and hierarchical segmentation that generalize the gPb-ucm approach of [2] by making effective use of depth information. We show that our system can label each contour with its type (depth, normal or albedo). We also propose a generic method for long-range amodal completion of surfaces and show its effectiveness in grouping. We then turn to the problem of semantic segmentation and propose a simple approach that classifies super pixels into the 40 dominant object categories in NYUD2. We use both generic and class-specific features to encode the appearance and geometry of objects. We also show how our approach can be used for scene classification, and how this contextual information in turn improves object recognition. In all of these tasks, we report significant improvements over the state-of-the-art. Human activity recognition based on RGB-D data has received more attention in recent years. We propose a spatiotemporal feature named three-dimensional (3D) sparse motion scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT) from RGB-D data for activity recognition. First, we build pyramids as scale space for each RGB and depth frame, and then use Shi-Tomasi corner detector and sparse optical flow to quickly detect and track robust keypoints around the motion pattern in the scale space. Subsequently, local patches around keypoints, which are extracted from RGB-D data, are used to build 3D gradient and motion spaces. Then SIFT-like descriptors are calculated on both 3D spaces, respectively. The proposed feature is invariant to scale, transition, and partial occlusions. More importantly, the running time of the proposed feature is fast so that it is well-suited for real-time applications. We have evaluated the proposed feature under a bag of words model on three public RGB-D datasets: one-shot learning Chalearn Gesture Dataset, Cornell Activity Dataset-60, and MSR Daily Activity 3D dataset. Experimental results show that the proposed feature outperforms other spatiotemporal features and are comparative to other state-of-the-art approaches, even though there is only one training sample for each class. In this work we address the problem of feature extraction for object recognition in the context of cameras providing RGB and depth information (RGB-D data). We consider this problem in a bag of features like setting and propose a new, learned, local feature descriptor for RGB-D images, the convolutional k-means descriptor. The descriptor is based on recent results from the machine learning community. It automatically learns feature responses in the neighborhood of detected interest points and is able to combine all available information, such as color and depth into one, concise representation. To demonstrate the strength of this approach we show its applicability to different recognition problems. We evaluate the quality of the descriptor on the RGB-D Object Dataset where it is competitive with previously published results and propose an embedding into an image processing pipeline for object recognition and pose estimation. This paper presents an approach for human action recognition by finding the discriminative key frames from a video sequence and representing them with the distribution of local motion features and their spatiotemporal arrangements. In this approach, the key frames of the video sequence are selected by their discriminative power and represented by the local motion features detected in them and integrated from their temporal neighbors. In the key frame’s representation, the spatial arrangements of the motion features are captured in a hierarchical spatial pyramid structure. By using frame by frame voting for the recognition, experiments have demonstrated improved performances over most of the other known methods on the popular benchmark data sets. Recognizinghumanactionfromimagesequencesis an appealingyet challengingproblem in computer vision with many applications including motion capture, human-computer interaction, environment control, and security surveillance. In this paper, we focus on recognizing the activities of a person in an image sequence from local motion features and their spatiotemporal arrangements. Our approach is motivated by the recent success of “bag-of-words” model for general object recognition in computer vision[21, 14]. This representation, which is adapted from the text retrieval literature, models the object by the distribution of words from a fixed visual code book, which is usually obtained by vector quantization of local image visual features. However, this method discards the spatial and the temporal relations among these visual features, which could be helpful in object recognition. Addressing this problem, our approach uses a hierarchical representation for the key frames of a given video sequence to integrate information from both the spatial and the temporal domains. We first apply a spatiotemporal feature detector to the video sequence and obtain the local motion features. Then we generate a visual word code book by quantization of the local motion features and assign a word label to each of them. Next we select key frames of the video sequence by their discriminative power. Then, for each key frame, we integrate the visual words from its nearby frames, divide the key frame spatially into finer subdivisions and compute in each cell the histograms of the visual words detected in this key frame and its temporal neighbors. Finally, we concatenate the histograms from all cells and use A key requirement for leveraging supervised deep learning methods is the availability of large, labeled datasets. Unfortunately, in the context of RGB-D scene understanding, very little data is available &#x2013; current datasets cover a small range of scene views and have limited semantic annotations. To address this issue, we introduce ScanNet, an RGB-D video dataset containing 2.5M views in 1513 scenes annotated with 3D camera poses, surface reconstructions, and semantic segmentations. To collect this data, we designed an easy-to-use and scalable RGB-D capture system that includes automated surface reconstruction and crowdsourced semantic annotation. We show that using this data helps achieve state-of-the-art performance on several 3D scene understanding tasks, including 3D object classification, semantic voxel labeling, and CAD model retrieval. This paper proposes a novel approach to action recognition from RGB-D cameras, in which depth features and RGB visual features are jointly used. Rich heterogeneous RGB and depth data are effectively compressed and projected to a learned shared space, in order to reduce noise and capture useful information for recognition. Knowledge from various sources can then be shared with others in the learned space to learn cross-modal features. This guides the discovery of valuable information for recognition. To capture complex spatiotemporal structural relationships in visual and depth features, we represent both RGB and depth data in a matrix form. We formulate the recognition task as a low-rank bilinear model composed of row and column parameter matrices. The rank of the model parameter is minimized to build a low-rank classifier, which is beneficial for improving the generalization power. The proposed method is extensively evaluated on two public RGB-D action datasets, and achieves state-of-the-art results. It also shows promising results if RGB or depth data are missing in training or testing procedure. The recognition of a place depicted in an image typically adopts methods from image retrieval in large-scale databases. First, a query image is described as a “bag-of-features” and compared to every image in the database. Second, the most similar images are passed to a geometric verification stage. However, this is an inefficient approach when considering that some database images may be almost identical, and many image features may not repeatedly occur. We address this issue by clustering similar database images to represent distinct scenes, and tracking local features that are consistently detected to form a set of real-world landmarks. Query images are then matched to landmarks rather than features, and a probabilistic model of landmark properties is learned from the cluster to appropriately verify or reject putative feature matches. We present novelties in both a bag-of-features retrieval and geometric verification stage based on this concept. Results on a database of 200K images of popular tourist destinations show improvements in both recognition performance and efficiency compared to traditional image retrieval methods. A key requirement for leveraging supervised deep learning methods is the availability of large, labeled datasets. Unfortunately, in the context of RGB-D scene understanding, very little data is available -- current datasets cover a small range of scene views and have limited semantic annotations. To address this issue, we introduce ScanNet, an RGB-D video dataset containing 2.5M views in 1513 scenes annotated with 3D camera poses, surface reconstructions, and semantic segmentations. To collect this data, we designed an easy-to-use and scalable RGB-D capture system that includes automated surface reconstruction and crowdsourced semantic annotation. We show that using this data helps achieve state-of-the-art performance on several 3D scene understanding tasks, including 3D object classification, semantic voxel labeling, and CAD model retrieval. The dataset is freely available at this http URL. In this paper we study the problem of object detection for RGB-D images using semantically rich image and depth features. We propose a new geocentric embedding for depth images that encodes height above ground and angle with gravity for each pixel in addition to the horizontal disparity. We demonstrate that this geocentric embedding works better than using raw depth images for learning feature representations with convolutional neural networks. Our final object detection system achieves an average precision of 37.3 , which is a 56 relative improvement over existing methods. We then focus on the task of instance segmentation where we label pixels belonging to object instances found by our detector. For this task, we propose a decision forest approach that classifies pixels in the detection window as foreground or background using a family of unary and binary tests that query shape and geocentric pose features. Finally, we use the output from our object detectors in an existing superpixel classification framework for semantic scene segmentation and achieve a 24 relative improvement over current state-of-the-art for the object categories that we study. We believe advances such as those represented in this paper will facilitate the use of perception in fields like robotics. In this paper we study the problem of object detection for RGB-D images using semantically rich image and depth features. We propose a new geocentric embedding for depth images that encodes height above ground and angle with gravity for each pixel in addition to the horizontal disparity. We demonstrate that this geocentric embedding works better than using raw depth images for learning feature representations with convolutional neural networks. Our final object detection system achieves an average precision of 37.3 , which is a 56 relative improvement over existing methods. We then focus on the task of instance segmentation where we label pixels belonging to object instances found by our detector. For this task, we propose a decision forest approach that classifies pixels in the detection window as foreground or background using a family of unary and binary tests that query shape and geocentric pose features. Finally, we use the output from our object detectors in an existing superpixel classification framework for semantic scene segmentation and achieve a 24 relative improvement over current state-of-the-art for the object categories that we study. We believe advances such as those represented in this paper will facilitate the use of perception in fields like robotics. Object recognition from RGB-D images has become a hot topic and gained a significant popularity in recent years due to its numerous applications. In this paper, we propose a novel multimodal deep convolutional neural networks architecture for RGB-D object recognition which composed of three streams with two different types of deep CNNs, where each stream can separately learn from each modality. Finally, we propose a combined architecture of joint network of these three streams to classify the objects. Compared to RGB data, RGB-D images provide additional depth information that can be represented as depth colorization methods or surface normals. Our goal is to exploit both colorization and surface normals information to encode depth images. We show that by utilizing both colorization and surface normals of depth images combined with RGB significantly can improves the classification accuracy. We evaluate our model on one of the most challenging RGB-D object dataset and achieves comparable performance to state-of-the-art methods. Several recently-proposed architectures for high-performance object recognition are composed of two main stages: a feature extraction stage that extracts locally-invariant feature vectors from regularly spaced image patches, and a somewhat generic supervised classifier. The first stage is often composed of three main modules: (1) a bank of filters (often oriented edge detectors); (2) a non-linear transform, such as a point-wise squashing functions, quantization, or normalization; (3) a spatial pooling operation which combines the outputs of similar filters over neighboring regions. We propose a method that automatically learns such feature extractors in an unsupervised fashion by simultaneously learning the filters and the pooling units that combine multiple filter outputs together. The method automatically generates topographic maps of similar filters that extract features of orientations, scales, and positions. These similar filters are pooled together, producing locally-invariant outputs. The learned feature descriptors give comparable results as SIFT on image recognition tasks for which SIFT is well suited, and better results than SIFT on tasks for which SIFT is less well suited. Many state-of-the-art approaches for object recognition reduce the problem to a 0-1 classification task. This allows one to leverage sophisticated machine learning techniques for training classifiers from labeled examples. However, these models are typically trained independently for each class using positive and negative examples cropped from images. At test-time, various post-processing heuristics such as non-maxima suppression (NMS) are required to reconcile multiple detections within and between different classes for each image. Though crucial to good performance on benchmarks, this post-processing is usually defined heuristically. We introduce a unified model for multi-class object recognition that casts the problem as a structured prediction task. Rather than predicting a binary label for each image window independently, our model simultaneously predicts a structured labeling of the entire image (Fig. 1). Our model learns statistics that capture the spatial arrangements of various object classes in real images, both in terms of which arrangements to suppress through NMS and which arrangements to favor through spatial co-occurrence statistics. We formulate parameter estimation in our model as a max-margin learning problem. Given training images with ground-truth object locations, we show how to formulate learning as a convex optimization problem. We employ the cutting plane algorithm of (Mach. Learn. 2009) to efficiently learn a model from thousands of training images. We show state-of-the-art results on the PASCAL VOC benchmark that indicate the benefits of learning a global model encapsulating the spatial layout of multiple object classes (a preliminary version of this work appeared in ICCV 2009, , IEEE international conference on computer vision, 2009). Scene recognition with RGB images has been extensively studied and has reached very remarkable recognition levels, thanks to convolutional neural networks (CNN) and large scene datasets. In contrast, current RGB-D scene data is much more limited, so often leverages RGB large datasets, by transferring pretrained RGB CNN models and fine-tuning with the target RGB-D dataset. However, we show that this approach has the limitation of hardly reaching bottom layers, which is key to learn modality-specific features. In contrast, we focus on the bottom layers, and propose an alternative strategy to learn depth features combining local weakly supervised training from patches followed by global fine tuning with images. This strategy is capable of learning very discriminative depth-specific features with limited depth images, without resorting to Places-CNN. In addition we propose a modified CNN architecture to further match the complexity of the model and the amount of data available. For RGB-D scene recognition, depth and RGB features are combined by projecting them in a common space and further leaning a multilayer classifier, which is jointly optimized in an end-to-end network. Our framework achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on NYU2 and SUN RGB-D in both depth only and combined RGB-D data. Object recognition and pose estimation from RGB-D images are important tasks for manipulation robots which can be learned from examples. Creating and annotating datasets for learning is expensive, however. We address this problem with transfer learning from deep convolutional neural networks (CNN) that are pre-trained for image categorization and provide a rich, semantically meaningful feature set. We incorporate depth information, which the CNN was not trained with, by rendering objects from a canonical perspective and colorizing the depth channel according to distance from the object center. We evaluate our approach on the Washington RGB-D Objects dataset, where we find that the generated feature set naturally separates classes and instances well and retains pose manifolds. We outperform state-of-the-art on a number of subtasks and show that our approach can yield superior results when only little training data is available.