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
