Integrating a Non-Uniformly Sampled Software Retina with a Deep CNN Model

We present a biologically inspired method for pre-processing images applied to CNNs that reduces their memory requirements while increasing their invariance to scale and rotation changes. Our method is based on the mammalian retino-cortical transform: a mapping between a pseudo-randomly tessellated retina model (used to sample an input image) and a CNN. The aim of this first pilot study is to demonstrate a functional retinaintegrated CNN implementation and this produced the following results: a network using the full retino-cortical transform yielded an F1 score of 0.80 on a test set during a 4-way classification task, while an identical network not using the proposed method yielded an F1 score of 0.86 on the same task. The method reduced the visual data by e×7, the input data to the CNN by 40% and the number of CNN training epochs by 64%. These results demonstrate the viability of our method and hint at the potential of exploiting functional traits of natural vision systems in CNNs

Efficient Egocentric Visual Perception Combining Eye-tracking, a Software Retina and Deep Learning

We present ongoing work to harness biological approaches to achieving highly efficient egocentric perception by combining the space-variant imaging architecture of the mammalian retina with Deep Learning methods. By pre-processing images collected by means of eye-tracking glasses to control the fixation locations of a software retina model, we demonstrate that we can reduce the input to a DCNN by a factor of 3, reduce the required number of training epochs and obtain over 98% classification rates when training and validating the system on a database of over 26,000 images of 9 object classes.Comment: Accepted for: EPIC Workshop at the European Conference on Computer Vision, ECCV201

Parallel stereo vision algorithm

Integrating a stereo-photogrammetric robot head into a real-time system requires software solutions that rapidly resolve the stereo correspondence problem. The stereo-matcher presented in this paper uses therefore code parallelisation and was tested on three different processors with x87 and AVX. The results show that a 5mega pixels colour image can be matched in 5,55 seconds or as monochrome in 3,3 seconds

Object Edge Contour Localisation Based on HexBinary Feature Matching

This paper addresses the issue of localising object edge contours in cluttered backgrounds to support robotics tasks such as grasping and manipulation and also to improve the potential perceptual capabilities of robot vision systems. Our approach is based on coarse-to-fine matching of a new recursively constructed hierarchical, dense, edge-localised descriptor, the HexBinary, based on the HexHog descriptor structure first proposed in [1]. Since Binary String image descriptors [2]– [5] require much lower computational resources, but provide similar or even better matching performance than Histogram of Orientated Gradient (HoG) descriptors, we have replaced the HoG base descriptor fields used in HexHog with Binary Strings generated from first and second order polar derivative approximations. The ALOI [6] dataset is used to evaluate the HexBinary descriptors which we demonstrate to achieve a superior performance to that of HexHoG [1] for pose refinement. The validation of our object contour localisation system shows promising results with correctly labelling ~86% of edgel positions and mis-labelling ~3%

A Portable Active Binocular Robot Vision Architecture for Scene Exploration

We present a portable active binocular robot vision archi- tecture that integrates a number of visual behaviours. This vision archi- tecture inherits the abilities of vergence, localisation, recognition and si- multaneous identification of multiple target object instances. To demon- strate the portability of our vision architecture, we carry out qualitative and comparative analysis under two different hardware robotic settings, feature extraction techniques and viewpoints. Our portable active binoc- ular robot vision architecture achieved average recognition rates of 93.5% for fronto-parallel viewpoints and, 83% percentage for anthropomorphic viewpoints, respectively

Interactive Perception based on Gaussian Process Classification Applied to Household Object Recognition & Sorting

No abstract available

Interactive Perception Based on Gaussian Process Classification for House-Hold Objects Recognition and Sorting

We present an interactive perception model for object sorting based on Gaussian Process (GP) classification that is capable of recognizing objects categories from point cloud data. In our approach, FPFH features are extracted from point clouds to describe the local 3D shape of objects and a Bag-of-Words coding method is used to obtain an object-level vocabulary representation. Multi-class Gaussian Process classification is employed to provide and probable estimation of the identity of the object and serves a key role in the interactive perception cycle – modelling perception confidence. We show results from simulated input data on both SVM and GP based multi-class classifiers to validate the recognition accuracy of our proposed perception model. Our results demonstrate that by using a GP-based classifier, we obtain true positive classification rates of up to 80%. Our semi-autonomous object sorting experiments show that the proposed GP based interactive sorting approach outperforms random sorting by up to 30% when applied to scenes comprising configurations of household objects

Recognising the Clothing Categories from Free-Configuration Using Gaussian-Process-Based Interactive Perception

In this paper, we propose a Gaussian Process- based interactive perception approach for recognising highly- wrinkled clothes. We have integrated this recognition method within a clothes sorting pipeline for the pre-washing stage of an autonomous laundering process. Our approach differs from reported clothing manipulation approaches by allowing the robot to update its perception confidence via numerous interactions with the garments. The classifiers predominantly reported in clothing perception (e.g. SVM, Random Forest) studies do not provide true classification probabilities, due to their inherent structure. In contrast, probabilistic classifiers (of which the Gaussian Process is a popular example) are able to provide predictive probabilities. In our approach, we employ a multi-class Gaussian Process classification using the Laplace approximation for posterior inference and optimising hyper-parameters via marginal likelihood maximisation. Our experimental results show that our approach is able to recognise unknown garments from highly-occluded and wrinkled con- figurations and demonstrates a substantial improvement over non-interactive perception approaches