We consider the problem of object recognition in 3D using an ensemble of attribute-based classifiers. We propose two new concepts to improve classification in practical situations, and show their implementation in an approach implemented for recognition from point-cloud data. First, the viewing conditions can have a strong influence on classification performance. We study the impact of the distance between the camera and the object and propose an approach to fuse multiple attribute classifiers, which incorporates distance into the decision making. Second, lack of representative training samples often makes it difficult to learn the optimal threshold value for best positive and negative detection rate. We address this issue, by setting in our attribute classifiers instead of just one threshold value, two threshold values to distinguish a positive, a negative and an uncertainty class, and we prove the theoretical correctness of this approach. Empirical studies demonstrate the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed concepts.
Reliable object recognition is a mandatory prerequisite for Service Robots in everyday environments. Typical approaches for object recognition use single algorithms or features. However, none is yet able to classify across all types of objects and the field of object recognition is thus still an open challenge. We propose an approach for object recognition and pose estimation that combines existing algorithms. Probabilistic methods are used to fuse the classification and pose estimation results, considering the error introduced by the measurements, actuators (sensor on manipulator) and algorithms. Since integration is one of the real challenges from the laboratory towards the real world, we demonstrate the approach in two fully integrated scenarios. We run the experiments on two platforms and focus on the distinction of few but similar objects. We present MOPED, a framework for Multiple Object Pose Estimation and Detection that seamlessly integrates single-image and multi-image object recognition and pose estimation in one optimized, robust, and scalable framework. We address two main challenges in computer vision for robotics: robust performance in complex scenes, and low latency for real-time operation. We achieve robust performance with Iterative Clustering Estimation (ICE), a novel algorithm that iteratively combines feature clustering with robust pose estimation. Feature clustering quickly partitions the scene and produces object hypotheses. The hypotheses are used to further refine the feature clusters, and the two steps iterate until convergence. ICE is easy to parallelize, and easily integrates single- and multi-camera object recognition and pose estimation. We also introduce a novel object hypothesis scoring function based on M-estimator theory, and a novel pose clustering algorithm that robustly handles recognition outliers. We achieve scalability and low latency with an improved feature matching algorithm for large databases, a GPU CPU hybrid architecture that exploits parallelism at all levels, and an optimized resource scheduler. We provide extensive experimental results demonstrating state-of-the-art performance in terms of recognition, scalability, and latency in real-world robotic applications. Despite the rich information provided by sensors such as the Microsoft Kinect in the robotic perception setting, the problem of detecting object instances remains unsolved, even in the tabletop setting, where segmentation is greatly simplified. Existing object detection systems often focus on textured objects, for which local feature descriptors can be used to reliably obtain correspondences between different views of the same object. We examine the benefits of dense feature extraction and multimodal features for improving the accuracy and robustness of an instance recognition system. By combining multiple modalities and blending their scores through an ensemble-based method in order to generate our final object hypotheses, we obtain significant improvements over previously published results on two RGB-D datasets. On the Challenge dataset, our method results in only one missed detection (achieving 100 precision and 99.77 recall). On the Willow dataset, we also make significant gains on the prior state of the art (achieving 98.28 precision and 87.78 recall), resulting in an increase in F-score from 0.8092 to 0.9273. Ensuring robustness in object recognition pose estimation under a wide variation of environmental parameters, such as illumination, scale, perspective as well as occlusion, is still of a challenge in computer vision. One way to meet this challenge is by using multiple features evidences that offer their own strengths against particular environmental variations. To this end, methods of how to choose an optimal combination of features evidences and of how to design an optimal classifier decision-maker with the assignment of proper weights to the chosen individual features evidences, for a given environmental parameter reading, are to be addressed. This paper presents a framework of adaptive Bayesian recognition that puts its particular emphasis on addressing the two methods described above while integrating multiple evidences. The novelty of the proposed method lies in 1) an AND OR graph representation of evidence structure for individual object, representing explicitly a set of combined evidences sufficient for decision, 2) An automatic update of the Bayesian network tables of conditional probabilities based on the current environmental parameters measured, and 3) the incorporation of occlusions into the computation of Bayesian posterior probabilities for decision. The experimental results show that the proposed method is capable of dealing with adverse situations for which conventional methods fail to provide recognition. Robust object recognition is a crucial requirement for many robotic applications. We propose a method towards increasing reliability and flexibility of object recognition for robotics. This is achieved by the fusion of diverse recognition frameworks and algorithms on score level which use characteristics like shape, texture and color of the objects. Machine Learning allows for the automatic combination of the respective recognition methods' outputs instead of having to adapt their hypothesis metrics to a common basis. We show the applicability of our approach through several real-world experiments in a service robotics environment. Great importance is attached to robustness, especially in varying environments.