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%
