3D Face Synthesis with KINECT

This work describes the process of face synthesis by image morphing from less expensive 3D sensors such as KINECT that are prone to sensor noise. Its main aim is to create a useful face database for future face recognition studies.Peer reviewe

Categorization of indoor places using the Kinect sensor

The categorization of places in indoor environments is an important capability for service robots working and interacting with humans. In this paper we present a method to categorize different areas in indoor environments using a mobile robot equipped with a Kinect camera. Our approach transforms depth and grey scale images taken at each place into histograms of local binary patterns (LBPs) whose dimensionality is further reduced following a uniform criterion. The histograms are then combined into a single feature vector which is categorized using a supervised method. In this work we compare the performance of support vector machines and random forests as supervised classifiers. Finally, we apply our technique to distinguish five different place categories: corridors, laboratories, offices, kitchens, and study rooms. Experimental results show that we can categorize these places with high accuracy using our approach

Semantic Pose using Deep Networks Trained on Synthetic RGB-D

In this work we address the problem of indoor scene understanding from RGB-D images. Specifically, we propose to find instances of common furniture classes, their spatial extent, and their pose with respect to generalized class models. To accomplish this, we use a deep, wide, multi-output convolutional neural network (CNN) that predicts class, pose, and location of possible objects simultaneously. To overcome the lack of large annotated RGB-D training sets (especially those with pose), we use an on-the-fly rendering pipeline that generates realistic cluttered room scenes in parallel to training. We then perform transfer learning on the relatively small amount of publicly available annotated RGB-D data, and find that our model is able to successfully annotate even highly challenging real scenes. Importantly, our trained network is able to understand noisy and sparse observations of highly cluttered scenes with a remarkable degree of accuracy, inferring class and pose from a very limited set of cues. Additionally, our neural network is only moderately deep and computes class, pose and position in tandem, so the overall run-time is significantly faster than existing methods, estimating all output parameters simultaneously in parallel on a GPU in seconds.Comment: ICCV 2015 Submissio

Fast Graph-Based Object Segmentation for RGB-D Images

Object segmentation is an important capability for robotic systems, in particular for grasping. We present a graph- based approach for the segmentation of simple objects from RGB-D images. We are interested in segmenting objects with large variety in appearance, from lack of texture to strong textures, for the task of robotic grasping. The algorithm does not rely on image features or machine learning. We propose a modified Canny edge detector for extracting robust edges by using depth information and two simple cost functions for combining color and depth cues. The cost functions are used to build an undirected graph, which is partitioned using the concept of internal and external differences between graph regions. The partitioning is fast with O(NlogN) complexity. We also discuss ways to deal with missing depth information. We test the approach on different publicly available RGB-D object datasets, such as the Rutgers APC RGB-D dataset and the RGB-D Object Dataset, and compare the results with other existing methods