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.
All these works build on top of CNNs pre-trained over ImageNet, for all modal channels. Thus, the very same filters are used to extract features from all of them. As empirically successful as this might be, it is a questionable strategy, as RGB and depth images are perceptually very different, and as such they would benefit from approaches able to learn data-specific features (figure ). Our method matches this challenge, learning RGB features from RGB data and depth features from synthetically generated data, within a deep learning framework. The use of realistic synthetic data in conjunction with deep learning architectures is a promising emerging trend @cite_3 @cite_30 @cite_16 . We are not aware of previous work attempting to use synthetic data to learn depth representations, with or without deep learning techniques.
@cite_30 @cite_16 @cite_3
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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. 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. In this paper, we explore various aspects of fusing LIDAR and color imagery for pedestrian detection in the context of convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which have recently become state-of-art for many vision problems. We incorporate LIDAR by up-sampling the point cloud to a dense depth map and then extracting three features representing different aspects of the 3D scene. We then use those features as extra image channels. Specifically, we leverage recent work on HHA [9] (horizontal disparity, height above ground, and angle) representations, adapting the code to work on up-sampled LIDAR rather than Microsoft Kinect depth maps. We show, for the first time, that such a representation is applicable to up-sampled LIDAR data, despite its sparsity. Since CNNs learn a deep hierarchy of feature representations, we then explore the question: At what level of representation should we fuse this additional information with the original RGB image channels? We use the KITTI pedestrian detection dataset for our exploration. We first replicate the finding that region-CNNs (R-CNNs) [8] can outperform the original proposal mechanism using only RGB images, but only if fine-tuning is employed. Then, we show that: 1) using HHA features and RGB images performs better than RGB-only, even without any fine-tuning using large RGB web data, 2) fusing RGB and HHA achieves the strongest results if done late, but, under a parameter or computational budget, is best done at the early to middle layers of the hierarchical representation, which tend to represent midlevel features rather than low (e.g. edges) or high (e.g. object class decision) level features, 3) some of the less successful methods have the most parameters, indicating that increased classification accuracy is not simply a function of increased capacity in the neural network. 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. In human learning, it is common to use multiple sources of information jointly. However, most existing feature learning approaches learn from only a single task. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-task deep network to learn generalizable high-level visual representations. Since multitask learning requires annotations for multiple properties of the same training instance, we look to synthetic images to train our network. To overcome the domain difference between real and synthetic data, we employ an unsupervised feature space domain adaptation method based on adversarial learning. Given an input synthetic RGB image, our network simultaneously predicts its surface normal, depth, and instance contour, while also minimizing the feature space domain differences between real and synthetic data. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our network learns more transferable representations compared to single-task baselines. Our learned representation produces state-of-the-art transfer learning results on PASCAL VOC 2007 classification and 2012 detection. We introduce SceneNet RGB-D, a dataset providing pixel-perfect ground truth for scene understanding problems such as semantic segmentation, instance segmentation, and object detection. It also provides perfect camera poses and depth data, allowing investigation into geometric computer vision problems such as optical flow, camera pose estimation, and 3D scene labelling tasks. Random sampling permits virtually unlimited scene configurations, and here we provide 5M rendered RGB-D images from 16K randomly generated 3D trajectories in synthetic layouts, with random but physically simulated object configurations. We compare the semantic segmentation performance of network weights produced from pretraining on RGB images from our dataset against generic VGG-16 ImageNet weights. After fine-tuning on the SUN RGB-D and NYUv2 real-world datasets we find in both cases that the synthetically pre-trained network outperforms the VGG-16 weights. When synthetic pre-training includes a depth channel (something ImageNet cannot natively provide) the performance is greater still. This suggests that large-scale high-quality synthetic RGB datasets with task-specific labels can be more useful for pretraining than real-world generic pre-training such as ImageNet. We host the dataset at http: robotvault. bitbucket.io scenenet-rgbd.html. 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. Exploration in an unknown environment is an elemental application for mobile robots. In this paper, we outlined a reinforcement learning method aiming for solving the exploration problem in a corridor environment. The learning model took the depth image from an RGB-D sensor as the only input. The feature representation of the depth image was extracted through a pre-trained convolutional-neural-networks model. Based on the recent success of deep Q-network on artificial intelligence, the robot controller achieved the exploration and obstacle avoidance abilities in several different simulated environments. It is the first time that the reinforcement learning is used to build an exploration strategy for mobile robots through raw sensor information. We present a modality hallucination architecture for training an RGB object detection model which incorporates depth side information at training time. Our convolutional hallucination network learns a new and complementary RGB image representation which is taught to mimic convolutional mid-level features from a depth network. At test time images are processed jointly through the RGB and hallucination networks to produce improved detection performance. Thus, our method transfers information commonly extracted from depth training data to a network which can extract that information from the RGB counterpart. We present results on the standard NYUDv2 dataset and report improvement on the RGB detection task. Most of the existing approaches for RGB-D indoor scene labeling employ hand-crafted features for each modality independently and combine them in a heuristic manner. There has been some attempt on directly learning features from raw RGB-D data, but the performance is not satisfactory. In this paper, we adapt the unsupervised feature learning technique for RGB-D labeling as a multi-modality learning problem. Our learning framework performs feature learning and feature encoding simultaneously which significantly boosts the performance. By stacking basic learning structure, higher-level features are derived and combined with lower-level features for better representing RGB-D data. Experimental results on the benchmark NYU depth dataset show that our method achieves competitive performance, compared with state-of-the-art. We introduce a new approach to intrinsic image decomposition, the task of decomposing a single image into albedo and shading components. Our strategy, which we term direct intrinsics, is to learn a convolutional neural network (CNN) that directly predicts output albedo and shading channels from an input RGB image patch. Direct intrinsics is a departure from classical techniques for intrinsic image decomposition, which typically rely on physically-motivated priors and graph-based inference algorithms. The large-scale synthetic ground-truth of the MPI Sintel dataset plays the key role in training direct intrinsics. We demonstrate results on both the synthetic images of Sintel and the real images of the classic MIT intrinsic image dataset. On Sintel, direct intrinsics, using only RGB input, outperforms all prior work, including methods that rely on RGB+Depth input. Direct intrinsics also generalizes across modalities, our Sintel-trained CNN produces quite reasonable decompositions on the real images of the MIT dataset. Our results indicate that the marriage of CNNs with synthetic training data may be a powerful new technique for tackling classic problems in computer vision. A novel deep neural network training paradigm that exploits the conjoint information in multiple heterogeneous sources is proposed. Specifically, in a RGB-D based action recognition task, it cooperatively trains a single convolutional neural network (named c-ConvNet) on both RGB visual features and depth features, and deeply aggregates the two kinds of features for action recognition. Differently from the conventional ConvNet that learns the deep separable features for homogeneous modality-based classification with only one softmax loss function, the c-ConvNet enhances the discriminative power of the deeply learned features and weakens the undesired modality discrepancy by jointly optimizing a ranking loss and a softmax loss for both homogeneous and heterogeneous modalities. The ranking loss consists of intra-modality and cross-modality triplet losses, and it reduces both the intra-modality and cross-modality feature variations. Furthermore, the correlations between RGB and depth data are embedded in the c-ConvNet, and can be retrieved by either of the modalities and contribute to the recognition in the case even only one of the modalities is available. The proposed method was extensively evaluated on two large RGB-D action recognition datasets, ChaLearn LAP IsoGD and NTU RGB+D datasets, and one small dataset, SYSU 3D HOI, and achieved state-of-the-art results. We introduce a new approach to intrinsic image decomposition, the task of decomposing a single image into albedo and shading components. Our strategy, which we term direct intrinsics, is to learn a convolutional neural network (CNN) that directly predicts output albedo and shading channels from an input RGB image patch. Direct intrinsics is a departure from classical techniques for intrinsic image decomposition, which typically rely on physically-motivated priors and graph-based inference algorithms. The large-scale synthetic ground-truth of the MPI Sintel dataset plays a key role in training direct intrinsics. We demonstrate results on both the synthetic images of Sintel and the real images of the classic MIT intrinsic image dataset. On Sintel, direct intrinsics, using only RGB input, outperforms all prior work, including methods that rely on RGB+Depth input. Direct intrinsics also generalizes across modalities; it produces quite reasonable decompositions on the real images of the MIT dataset. Our results indicate that the marriage of CNNs with synthetic training data may be a powerful new technique for tackling classic problems in computer vision. 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. This paper describes a novel method called Deep Dynamic Neural Networks (DDNN) for multimodal gesture recognition. A semi-supervised hierarchical dynamic framework based on a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) is proposed for simultaneous gesture segmentation and recognition where skeleton joint information, depth and RGB images, are the multimodal input observations. Unlike most traditional approaches that rely on the construction of complex handcrafted features, our approach learns high-level spatio-temporal representations using deep neural networks suited to the input modality: a Gaussian-Bernouilli Deep Belief Network ( DBN ) to handle skelet al dynamics, and a 3D Convolutional Neural Network ( 3DCNN ) to manage and fuse batches of depth and RGB images. This is achieved through the modeling and learning of the emission probabilities of the HMM required to infer the gesture sequence. This purely data driven approach achieves a Jaccard index score of 0.81 in the ChaLearn LAP gesture spotting challenge. The performance is on par with a variety of state-of-the-art hand-tuned feature-based approaches and other learning-based methods, therefore opening the door to the use of deep learning techniques in order to further explore multimodal time series data. 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. Robust object recognition is a crucial ingredient of many, if not all, real-world robotics applications. This paper leverages recent progress on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and proposes a novel RGB-D architecture for object recognition. Our architecture is composed of two separate CNN processing streams - one for each modality - which are consecutively combined with a late fusion network. We focus on learning with imperfect sensor data, a typical problem in real-world robotics tasks. For accurate learning, we introduce a multi-stage training methodology and two crucial ingredients for handling depth data with CNNs. The first, an effective encoding of depth information for CNNs that enables learning without the need for large depth datasets. The second, a data augmentation scheme for robust learning with depth images by corrupting them with realistic noise patterns. We present state-of-the-art results on the RGB-D object dataset and show recognition in challenging RGB-D real-world noisy settings. Robust object recognition is a crucial ingredient of many, if not all, real-world robotics applications. This paper leverages recent progress on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and proposes a novel RGB-D architecture for object recognition. Our architecture is composed of two separate CNN processing streams - one for each modality - which are consecutively combined with a late fusion network. We focus on learning with imperfect sensor data, a typical problem in real-world robotics tasks. For accurate learning, we introduce a multi-stage training methodology and two crucial ingredients for handling depth data with CNNs. The first, an effective encoding of depth information for CNNs that enables learning without the need for large depth datasets. The second, a data augmentation scheme for robust learning with depth images by corrupting them with realistic noise patterns. We present state-of-the-art results on the RGB-D object dataset [15] and show recognition in challenging RGB-D real-world noisy settings. This paper introduces a reinforcement learning method for exploring a corridor environment with the depth information from an RGB-D sensor only. The robot controller achieves obstacle avoidance ability by pre-training of feature maps using the depth information. The system is based on the recent Deep Q-Network (DQN) framework where a convolution neural network structure was adopted in the Q-value estimation of the Q-learning method. We separate the DQN into a supervised deep learning structure and a Q-learning network. The experiments of a Turtlebot in the Gazebo simulation environment show the robustness to different kinds of corridor environments. All of the experiments use the same pre-training deep learning structure. Note that the robot is traveling in environments which are different from the pre-training environment. It is the first time that raw sensor information is used to build such an exploring strategy for robotics by reinforcement learning. Estimating human pose, shape, and motion from images and videos are fundamental challenges with many applications. Recent advances in 2D human pose estimation use large amounts of manually-labeled training data for learning convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Such data is time consuming to acquire and difficult to extend. Moreover, manual labeling of 3D pose, depth and motion is impractical. In this work we present SURREAL (Synthetic hUmans foR REAL tasks): a new large-scale dataset with synthetically-generated but realistic images of people rendered from 3D sequences of human motion capture data. We generate more than 6 million frames together with ground truth pose, depth maps, and segmentation masks. We show that CNNs trained on our synthetic dataset allow for accurate human depth estimation and human part segmentation in real RGB images. Our results and the new dataset open up new possibilities for advancing person analysis using cheap and large-scale synthetic data.