This paper proposes a new method called multimodal recurrent neural networks (RNNs) for RGB-D scene semantic segmentation. It is optimized to classify image pixels given two input sources: RGB color channels and depth maps. It simultaneously performs training of two RNNs that are crossly connected through information transfer layers, which are learnt to adaptively extract relevant cross-modality features. Each RNN model learns its representations from its own previous hidden states and transferred patterns from the other RNNs previous hidden states; thus, both model-specific and cross-modality features are retained. We exploit the structure of quad-directional 2D-RNNs to model the short- and long-range contextual information in the 2D input image. We carefully designed various baselines to efficiently examine our proposed model structure. We test our multimodal RNNs method on popular RGB-D benchmarks and show how it outperforms previous methods significantly and achieves competitive results with other state-of-the-art works.
We propose a feature, the Histogram of Oriented Normal Vectors (HONV), designed specifically to capture local geometric characteristics for object recognition with a depth sensor. Through our derivation, the normal vector orientation represented as an ordered pair of azimuthal angle and zenith angle can be easily computed from the gradients of the depth image. We form the HONV as a concatenation of local histograms of azimuthal angle and zenith angle. Since the HONV is inherently the local distribution of the tangent plane orientation of an object surface, we use it as a feature for object detection classification tasks. The object detection experiments on the standard RGB-D dataset [1] and a self-collected Chair-D dataset show that the HONV significantly outperforms traditional features such as HOG on the depth image and HOG on the intensity image, with an improvement of 11.6 in average precision. For object classification, the HONV achieved 5.0 improvement over state-of-the-art approaches. 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. Scene labeling research has mostly focused on outdoor scenes, leaving the harder case of indoor scenes poorly understood. Microsoft Kinect dramatically changed the landscape, showing great potentials for RGB-D perception (color+depth). Our main objective is to empirically understand the promises and challenges of scene labeling with RGB-D. We use the NYU Depth Dataset as collected and analyzed by Silberman and Fergus [30]. For RGB-D features, we adapt the framework of kernel descriptors that converts local similarities (kernels) to patch descriptors. For contextual modeling, we combine two lines of approaches, one using a superpixel MRF, and the other using a segmentation tree. We find that (1) kernel descriptors are very effective in capturing appearance (RGB) and shape (D) similarities; (2) both superpixel MRF and segmentation tree are useful in modeling context; and (3) the key to labeling accuracy is the ability to efficiently train and test with large-scale data. We improve labeling accuracy on the NYU Dataset from 56.6 to 76.1 . We also apply our approach to image-only scene labeling and improve the accuracy on the Stanford Background Dataset from 79.4 to 82.9 . In this paper we address three different computer vision tasks using a single basic architecture: depth prediction, surface normal estimation, and semantic labeling. We use a multiscale convolutional network that is able to adapt easily to each task using only small modifications, regressing from the input image to the output map directly. Our method progressively refines predictions using a sequence of scales, and captures many image details without any superpixels or low-level segmentation. We achieve state-of-the-art performance on benchmarks for all three tasks. This work addresses multi-class segmentation of indoor scenes with RGB-D inputs. While this area of research has gained much attention recently, most works still rely on hand-crafted features. In contrast, we apply a multiscale convolutional network to learn features directly from the images and the depth information. We obtain state-of-the-art on the NYU-v2 depth dataset with an accuracy of 64.5 . We illustrate the labeling of indoor scenes in videos sequences that could be processed in real-time using appropriate hardware such as an FPGA.