Abstract-Scene understanding is a necessary prerequisite for robots acting autonomously in complex environments. Low-cost RGB-D cameras such as Microsoft Kinect enabled new methods for analyzing indoor scenes and are now ubiquitously used in indoor robotics. We investigate strategies for efficient pixelwise object class labeling of indoor scenes that combine both pretrained semantic features transferred from a large color image dataset and geometric features, computed relative to the room structures, including a novel distance-from-wall feature, which encodes the proximity of scene points to a detected major wall of the room. We evaluate our approach on the popular NYU v2 dataset. Several deep learning models are tested, which are designed to exploit different characteristics of the data. This includes feature learning with two different pooling sizes. Our results indicate that combining semantic and geometric features yields significantly improved results for the task of object class segmentation.

Abstract-We propose a new approach for the segmentation of 3-D point clouds into geometric surfaces using adaptive surface models. Starting from an initial configuration, the algorithm converges to a stable segmentation through a new iterative splitand-merge procedure, which includes an adaptive mechanism for the creation and removal of segments. This allows the segmentation to adjust to changing input data along the movie, leading to stable, temporally coherent, and traceable segments. We tested the method on a large variety of data acquired with different range imaging devices, including a structured-light sensor and a time-of-flight camera, and successfully segmented the videos into surface segments. We further demonstrated the feasibility of the approach using quantitative evaluations based on ground-truth data.

Abstract-In this paper we present an automated system that is able to track and grasp a moving object within the workspace of a manipulator using range images acquired with a Microsoft Kinect sensor. Realtime tracking is achieved by a geometric particle filter on the affine group. Based on the tracked output, the pose of a 7-DoF WAM robotic arm is continuously updated using dynamic motor primitives until a distance measure between the tracked object and the gripper mounted on the arm is below a threshold. Then, it closes its three fingers and grasps the object. The tracker works in realtime and is robust to noise and partial occlusions. Using only the depth data makes our tracker independent of texture which is one of the key design goals in our approach. An experimental evaluation is provided along with a comparison of the proposed tracker with state-of-the-art approaches, including the OpenNItracker. The developed system is integrated with ROS and made available as part of IRI's ROS stack.

Abstract-Hand-crafted feature functions are usually designed based on the domain knowledge of a presumably controlled environment and often fail to generalize, as the statistics of realworld data cannot always be modeled correctly. Data-driven feature learning methods, on the other hand, have emerged as an alternative that often generalize better in uncontrolled environments. We present a simple, yet robust, 2D convolutional neural network extended to a concatenated 3D network that learns to extract features from the spatio-temporal domain of raw video data. The resulting network model is used for contentbased recognition of videos. Relying on a 2D convolutional neural network allows us to exploit a pretrained network as a descriptor that yielded the best results on the largest and challenging ILSVRC-2014 dataset. Experimental results on commonly used benchmarking video datasets demonstrate that our results are state-of-the-art in terms of accuracy and computational time without requiring any preprocessing (e.g., optic flow) or a priori knowledge on data capture (e.g., camera motion estimation), which makes it more general and flexible than other approaches. Our implementation is made available.

Deep learning is a type of machine perception method that attempts to model highlevel abstractions in data and encode them into a compact and robust representation. Such representations have found immense usage in applications related to computer vision. In this chapter we introduce two such applications, i.e., semantic segmentation of images and action recognition in videos. These applications are of fundamental importance for human-centered environment perception.