Although instance-aware perception is a key prerequisite for many autonomous robotic applications, most of the methods only partially solve the problem by focusing solely on known object categories. However, for robots interacting in dynamic and cluttered environments, this is not realistic and severely limits the range of potential applications. Therefore, we propose a novel object instance segmentation approach that does not require any semantic or geometric information of the objects beforehand. In contrast to existing works, we do not explicitly use depth data as input, but rely on the insight that slight viewpoint changes, which for example are provided by stereo image pairs, are often sufficient to determine object boundaries and thus to segment objects. Focusing on the versatility of stereo sensors, we employ a transformer-based architecture that maps directly from the pair of input images to the object instances. This has the major advantage that instead of a noisy, and potentially incomplete depth map as an input, on which the segmentation is computed, we use the original image pair to infer the object instances and a dense depth map. In experiments in several different application domains, we show that our Instance Stereo Transformer (INSTR) algorithm outperforms current state-of-the-art methods that are based on depth maps. Training code and pretrained models are available at https://github.com/DLR-RM/instr.
We present a novel framework for self-supervised grasped object segmentation with a robotic manipulator. Our method successively learns an agnostic foreground segmentation followed by a distinction between manipulator and object solely by observing the motion between consecutive RGB frames. In contrast to previous approaches, we propose a single, end-toend trainable architecture which jointly incorporates motion cues and semantic knowledge. Furthermore, while the motion of the manipulator and the object are substantial cues for our algorithm, we present means to robustly deal with distraction objects moving in the background, as well as with completely static scenes. Our method neither depends on any visual registration of a kinematic robot or 3D object models, nor on precise hand-eye calibration or any additional sensor data. By extensive experimental evaluation we demonstrate the superiority of our framework and provide detailed insights on its capability of dealing with the aforementioned extreme cases of motion. We also show that training a semantic segmentation network with the automatically labeled data achieves results on par with manually annotated training data. Code and pretrained model are available at https://github.com/DLR-RM/DistinctNet.
Although instance-aware perception is a key prerequisite for many autonomous robotic applications, most of the methods only partially solve the problem by focusing solely on known object categories. However, for robots interacting in dynamic and cluttered environments, this is not realistic and severely limits the range of potential applications. Therefore, we propose a novel object instance segmentation approach that does not require any semantic or geometric information of the objects beforehand. In contrast to existing works, we do not explicitly use depth data as input, but rely on the insight that slight viewpoint changes, which for example are provided by stereo image pairs, are often sufficient to determine object boundaries and thus to segment objects. Focusing on the versatility of stereo sensors, we employ a transformer-based architecture that maps directly from the pair of input images to the object instances. This has the major advantage that instead of a noisy, and potentially incomplete depth map as an input, on which the segmentation is computed, we use the original image pair to infer the object instances and a dense depth map. In experiments in several different application domains, we show that our Instance Stereo Transformer (INSTR) algorithm outperforms current state-of-the-art methods that are based on depth maps. Training code and pretrained models will be made available.
Kinematic structures are very common in the real world. They range from simple articulated objects to complex mechanical systems. However, despite their relevance, most model-based 3D tracking methods only consider rigid objects. To overcome this limitation, we propose a flexible framework that allows the extension of existing 6DoF algorithms to kinematic structures. Our approach focuses on methods that employ Newton-like optimization techniques, which are widely used in object tracking. The framework considers both tree-like and closed kinematic structures and allows a flexible configuration of joints and constraints. To project equations from individual rigid bodies to a multi-body system, Jacobians are used. For closed kinematic chains, a novel formulation that features Lagrange multipliers is developed. In a detailed mathematical proof, we show that our constraint formulation leads to an exact kinematic solution and converges in a single iteration. Based on the proposed framework, we extend ICG, which is a state-of-the-art rigid object tracking algorithm, to multi-body tracking. For the evaluation, we create a highly-realistic synthetic dataset that features a large number of sequences and various robots. Based on this dataset, we conduct a wide variety of experiments that demonstrate the excellent performance of the developed framework and our multi-body tracker.
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