Object detection models based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) demonstrate impressive performance when trained on large-scale labeled datasets. While a generic object detector trained on such a dataset performs adequately in applications where the input data is similar to user photographs, the detector performs poorly on small objects, particularly ones with limited training data or imaged from uncommon viewpoints. Also, a specific room will have many objects that are missed by standard object detectors, frustrating a robot that continually operates in the same indoor environment. This paper describes a system for rapidly creating customized object detectors. Data is collected from a quadcopter that is teleoperated with an interactive interface. Once an object is selected, the quadcopter autonomously photographs the object from multiple viewpoints to create training data that is used by DUNet (Dense Upscaled Net), collect data to train DUNet (Dense Upscaled Network), our proposed model for learning customized object detectors from scratch given limited data. Our experiments compare the performance of learning models from scratch with DUNet vs. fine tuning existing state of the art object detectors, both on our indoor robotics domain and on standard datasets.
Image datasets are typically sourced from the Internet but there is also a growing trend of datasets, particularly for robotics applications, collected directly from the real world. For instance, the KITTI dataset @cite_26 consists of roadway images taken from a car driving in an urban environment. There has also been significant recent progress in efficiently collecting large quantities of visual data using robots, including smart user interfaces for semi-automated data collection using drones (e.g., @cite_7 ) and indoor mobile robots (e.g., @cite_30 ).
@cite_30 @cite_26 @cite_7
2150066425 1971618559 2555440590 2593769898
Today, visual recognition systems are still rarely employed in robotics applications. Perhaps one of the main reasons for this is the lack of demanding benchmarks that mimic such scenarios. In this paper, we take advantage of our autonomous driving platform to develop novel challenging benchmarks for the tasks of stereo, optical flow, visual odometry SLAM and 3D object detection. Our recording platform is equipped with four high resolution video cameras, a Velodyne laser scanner and a state-of-the-art localization system. Our benchmarks comprise 389 stereo and optical flow image pairs, stereo visual odometry sequences of 39.2 km length, and more than 200k 3D object annotations captured in cluttered scenarios (up to 15 cars and 30 pedestrians are visible per image). Results from state-of-the-art algorithms reveal that methods ranking high on established datasets such as Middlebury perform below average when being moved outside the laboratory to the real world. Our goal is to reduce this bias by providing challenging benchmarks with novel difficulties to the computer vision community. Our benchmarks are available online at: www.cvlibs.net datasets kitti In this paper we propose a robust algorithm that generates an efficient and accurate dense 3D reconstruction with associated semantic labellings. Intelligent autonomous systems require accurate 3D reconstructions for applications such as navigation and localisation. Such systems also need to recognise their surroundings in order to identify and interact with objects of interest. Considerable emphasis has been given to generating a good reconstruction but less effort has gone into generating a 3D semantic model. The inputs to our algorithm are street level stereo image pairs acquired from a camera mounted on a moving vehicle. The depth-maps, generated from the stereo pairs across time, are fused into a global 3D volume online in order to accommodate arbitrary long image sequences. The street level images are automatically labelled using a Conditional Random Field (CRF) framework exploiting stereo images, and label estimates are aggregated to annotate the 3D volume. We evaluate our approach on the KITTI odometry dataset and have manually generated ground truth for object class segmentation. Our qualitative evaluation is performed on various sequences of the dataset and we also quantify our results on a representative subset. With the increasing performance of machine learning techniques in the last few years, the computer vision and robotics communities have created a large number of datasets for benchmarking object recognition tasks. These datasets cover a large spectrum of natural images and object categories, making them not only useful as a testbed for comparing machine learning approaches, but also a great resource for bootstrapping different domain-specific perception and robotic systems. One such domain is domestic environments, where an autonomous robot has to recognize a large variety of everyday objects such as groceries. This is a challenging task due to the large variety of objects and products, and where there is great need for real-world training data that goes beyond product images available online. In this paper, we address this issue and present a dataset consisting of 5,000 images covering 25 different classes of groceries, with at least 97 images per class. We collected all images from real-world settings at different stores and apartments. In contrast to existing groceries datasets, our dataset includes a large variety of perspectives, lighting conditions, and degrees of clutter. Overall, our images contain thousands of different object instances. It is our hope that machine learning and robotics researchers find this dataset of use for training, testing, and bootstrapping their approaches. As a baseline classifier to facilitate comparison, we re-trained the CaffeNet architecture (an adaptation of the well-known AlexNet) on our dataset and achieved a mean accuracy of 78.9 . We release this trained model along with the code and data splits we used in our experiments. We present a new public dataset with a focus on simulating robotic vision tasks in everyday indoor environments using real imagery. The dataset includes 20,000+ RGB-D images and 50,000+ 2D bounding boxes of object instances densely captured in 9 unique scenes. We train a fast object category detector for instance detection on our data. Using the dataset we show that, although increasingly accurate and fast, the state of the art for object detection is still severely impacted by object scale, occlusion, and viewing direction all of which matter for robotics applications. We next validate the dataset for simulating active vision, and use the dataset to develop and evaluate a deep-network-based system for next best move prediction for object classification using reinforcement learning. Our dataset is available for download at cs.unc.edu ∼ammirato active_vision_dataset_website .