State of the art visual relation detection methods have been relying on features extracted from RGB images including objects' 2D positions. In this paper, we argue that the 3D positions of objects in space can provide additional valuable information about object relations. This information helps not only to detect spatial relations, such as "standing behind", but also non-spatial relations, such as "holding". Since 3D information of a scene is not easily accessible, we propose incorporating a pre-trained RGB-to-Depth model within visual relation detection frameworks. We discuss different feature extraction strategies from depth maps and show their critical role in relation detection. Our experiments confirm that the performance of state-of-the-art visual relation detection approaches can significantly be improved by utilizing depth map information.
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. 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. Recently introduced RGB-D cameras are capable of providing high quality synchronized videos of both color and depth. With its advanced sensing capabilities, this technology represents an opportunity to dramatically increase the capabilities of object recognition. It also raises the problem of developing expressive features for the color and depth channels of these sensors. In this paper we introduce hierarchical matching pursuit (HMP) for RGB-D data. HMP uses sparse coding to learn hierarchical feature representations from raw RGB-D data in an unsupervised way. Extensive experiments on various datasets indicate that the features learned with our approach enable superior object recognition results using linear support vector machines.