Single-Shot Clothing Category Recognition in Free-Configurations with Application to Autonomous Clothes Sorting

This paper proposes a single-shot approach for recognising clothing categories from 2.5D features. We propose two visual features, BSP (B-Spline Patch) and TSD (Topology Spatial Distances) for this task. The local BSP features are encoded by LLC (Locality-constrained Linear Coding) and fused with three different global features. Our visual feature is robust to deformable shapes and our approach is able to recognise the category of unknown clothing in unconstrained and random configurations. We integrated the category recognition pipeline with a stereo vision system, clothing instance detection, and dual-arm manipulators to achieve an autonomous sorting system. To verify the performance of our proposed method, we build a high-resolution RGBD clothing dataset of 50 clothing items of 5 categories sampled in random configurations (a total of 2,100 clothing samples). Experimental results show that our approach is able to reach 83.2\% accuracy while classifying clothing items which were previously unseen during training. This advances beyond the previous state-of-the-art by 36.2\%. Finally, we evaluate the proposed approach in an autonomous robot sorting system, in which the robot recognises a clothing item from an unconstrained pile, grasps it, and sorts it into a box according to its category. Our proposed sorting system achieves reasonable sorting success rates with single-shot perception.Comment: 9 pages, accepted by IROS201

Presenting Computer Science Concepts to High School Students

Computer science at high school often focusses on programming, but a broader view of other areas of computer science has key benefits for both writing programs that are more efficient and making more theoretical concepts more accessible to those who do not find programming intrinsically interesting. With the introduction of computer science at high schools, a lack of coherent resources for teachers and students prompted the development of the NZ Computer Science Field Guide, an open-source, on-line textbook. This paper describes the design of the Field Guide, which has fourteen chapters about various topics of computer science. The design includes written text, videos, classroom activities and interactive applications. The need for a broad view of computer science is discussed, and programming exercises to go with the topics are suggested

Intelligent manipulation technique for multi-branch robotic systems

New analytical development in kinematics planning is reported. The INtelligent KInematics Planner (INKIP) consists of the kinematics spline theory and the adaptive logic annealing process. Also, a novel framework of robot learning mechanism is introduced. The FUzzy LOgic Self Organized Neural Networks (FULOSONN) integrates fuzzy logic in commands, control, searching, and reasoning, the embedded expert system for nominal robotics knowledge implementation, and the self organized neural networks for the dynamic knowledge evolutionary process. Progress on the mechanical construction of SRA Advanced Robotic System (SRAARS) and the real time robot vision system is also reported. A decision was made to incorporate the Local Area Network (LAN) technology in the overall communication system

A MODEL VISION OF SORTING SYSTEM APPLICATION USING ROBOTIC MANIPULATOR

Image processing in today’s world grabs massive attentions as it leads to possibilities of broaden application in many fields of high technology. The real challenge is how to improve existing sorting system in the Moduler Processing System (MPS) laboratirium which consists of four integrated stations of distribution, testing, processing and handling with a new image processing feature. Existing sorting method uses a set of inductive, capacitive and optical sensors do differentiate object color. This paper presents a mechatronics color sorting system solution with the application of image processing. Supported by OpenCV, image processing procedure senses the circular objects in an image captured in realtime by a webcam and then extracts color and position information out of it. This information is passed as a sequence of sorting commands to the manipulator (Mitsubishi Movemaster RV-M1) that does pick-and-place mechanism. Extensive testing proves that this color based object sorting system works 100% accurate under ideal condition in term of adequate illumination, circular objects’ shape and color. The circular objects tested for sorting are silver, red and black. For non-ideal condition, such as unspecified color the accuracy reduces to 80%.

Component-based Segmentation of words from handwritten Arabic text

Efficient preprocessing is very essential for automatic recognition of handwritten documents. In this paper, techniques on segmenting words in handwritten Arabic text are presented. Firstly, connected components (ccs) are extracted, and distances among different components are analyzed. The statistical distribution of this distance is then obtained to determine an optimal threshold for words segmentation. Meanwhile, an improved projection based method is also employed for baseline detection. The proposed method has been successfully tested on IFN/ENIT database consisting of 26459 Arabic words handwritten by 411 different writers, and the results were promising and very encouraging in more accurate detection of the baseline and segmentation of words for further recognition

One machine, one minute, three billion tetrahedra

This paper presents a new scalable parallelization scheme to generate the 3D Delaunay triangulation of a given set of points. Our first contribution is an efficient serial implementation of the incremental Delaunay insertion algorithm. A simple dedicated data structure, an efficient sorting of the points and the optimization of the insertion algorithm have permitted to accelerate reference implementations by a factor three. Our second contribution is a multi-threaded version of the Delaunay kernel that is able to concurrently insert vertices. Moore curve coordinates are used to partition the point set, avoiding heavy synchronization overheads. Conflicts are managed by modifying the partitions with a simple rescaling of the space-filling curve. The performances of our implementation have been measured on three different processors, an Intel core-i7, an Intel Xeon Phi and an AMD EPYC, on which we have been able to compute 3 billion tetrahedra in 53 seconds. This corresponds to a generation rate of over 55 million tetrahedra per second. We finally show how this very efficient parallel Delaunay triangulation can be integrated in a Delaunay refinement mesh generator which takes as input the triangulated surface boundary of the volume to mesh