We address the problem of localizing waste objects from a color image and an optional depth image, which is a key perception component for robotic interaction with such objects. Specifically, our method integrates the intensity and depth information at multiple levels of spatial granularity. Firstly, a scene-level deep network produces an initial coarse segmentation, based on which we select a few potential object regions to zoom in and perform fine segmentation. The results of the above steps are further integrated into a densely connected conditional random field that learns to respect the appearance, depth, and spatial affinities with pixel-level accuracy. In addition, we create a new RGBD waste object segmentation dataset, MJU-Waste, that is made public to facilitate future research in this area. The efficacy of our method is validated on both MJU-Waste and the Trash Annotation in Context (TACO) dataset.
Boston University（波士顿大学）；Worcester Polytechnic Institute（伍斯特理工学院）；Georgetown University（乔治城大学）；MIT-IBM Watson Lab（麻省理工学院-IBM沃森实验室）；Hanbat National University（韩巴国立大学）；SI Analytics（SI分析公司）；Tel-Aviv University（特拉维夫大学）；Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学）
Label-efficient and reliable semantic segmentation is essential for many real-life applications, especially for industrial settings with high visual diversity, such as waste sorting. In industrial waste sorting, one of the biggest challenges is the extreme diversity of the input stream depending on factors like the location of the sorting facility, the equipment available in the facility, and the time of year, all of which significantly impact the composition and visual appearance of the waste stream. These changes in the data are called ``visual domains'', and label-efficient adaptation of mo…
Population growth in the last decades has resulted in the production of about 2.01 billion tons of municipal waste per year. The current waste management systems are not capable of providing adequate solutions for the disposal and use of these wastes. Recycling and reuse have proven to be a solution to the problem, but large-scale waste segregation is a tedious task and on a small scale it depends on public awareness. This research used convolutional neural networks and computer vision to develop a tool for the automation of solid waste sorting. The Fotini10k dataset was constructed, which has…
Learning to Weigh Waste: A Physics-Informed Multimodal Fusion Framework and Large-Scale Dataset for Commercial and Industrial Applications
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, United International University（计算机科学与工程系，国际大学）；Applied Artificial Intelligence and Intelligent Systems (AAIINS) Laboratory（应用人工智能与智能系统实验室）；Department of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, Monash University（数据科学与人工智能系，墨尔本大学）；Faculty of Science and Technology, Charles Darwin University（科学与技术学院，查尔斯达尔文大学）；Faculty of Arts and Society, Charles Darwin University（艺术与社会学院，查尔斯达尔文大学）
Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne（洛桑联邦理工学院）；Cortexia SA；Haute Ecole Arc（瑞士西部高等专业学院）；Istanbul Technical University（伊斯坦布尔理工大学）
Littering quantification is an important step for improving cleanliness of cities. When human interpretation is too cumbersome or in some cases impossible, an objective index of cleanliness could reduce the littering by awareness actions. In this paper, we present a fully automated computer vision application for littering quantification based on images taken from the streets and sidewalks. We have employed a deep learning based framework to localize and classify different types of wastes. Since there was no waste dataset available, we built our acquisition system mounted on a vehicle. Collect…
From diagnosing neovascular diseases to detecting white matter lesions, accurate tiny vessel segmentation in fundus images is critical. Promising results for accurate vessel segmentation have been known. However, their effectiveness in segmenting tiny vessels is still limited. In this paper, we study retinal vessel segmentation by incorporating tiny vessel segmentation into our framework for the overall accurate vessel segmentation. To achieve this, we propose a new deep convolutional neural network (CNN) which divides vessel segmentation into two separate objectives. Specifically, we consider…
Video object segmentation, i.e., the separation of a target object from background in video, has made significant progress on real and challenging videos in recent years. To leverage this progress in 3D applications, this paper addresses the problem of learning to estimate the depth of segmented objects given some measurement of camera motion (e.g., from robot kinematics or vehicle odometry). We achieve this by, first, introducing a diverse, extensible dataset and, second, designing a novel deep network that estimates the depth of objects using only segmentation masks and uncalibrated camera m…
We investigate the problem of strictly unsupervised video object segmentation, i.e., the separation of a primary object from background in video without a user-provided object mask or any training on an annotated dataset. We find foreground objects in low-level vision data using a John Tukey-inspired measure of "outlierness". This Tukey-inspired measure also estimates the reliability of each data source as video characteristics change (e.g., a camera starts moving). The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art results for strictly unsupervised video object segmentation on the challenging DAVI…
California Institute of Technology（加州理工学院）；Allen Institute for Brain Science（艾伦脑科学研究所）；University of California, Los Angeles（加州大学洛杉矶分校）
In this paper we provide an extensive evaluation of fixation prediction and salient object segmentation algorithms as well as statistics of major datasets. Our analysis identifies serious design flaws of existing salient object benchmarks, called the dataset design bias, by over emphasizing the stereotypical concepts of saliency. The dataset design bias does not only create the discomforting disconnection between fixations and salient object segmentation, but also misleads the algorithm designing. Based on our analysis, we propose a new high quality dataset that offers both fixation and salien…
The University of Western Australia（西澳大学）；Griffith University（格里菲斯大学）
Current semi-supervised video object segmentation (VOS) methods usually leverage the entire features of one frame to predict object masks and update memory. This introduces significant redundant computations. To reduce redundancy, we present a Region Aware Video Object Segmentation (RAVOS) approach that predicts regions of interest (ROIs) for efficient object segmentation and memory storage. RAVOS includes a fast object motion tracker to predict their ROIs in the next frame. For efficient segmentation, object features are extracted according to the ROIs, and an object decoder is designed for o…
Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar（印度理工学院甘地纳加尔分校）
Automatic segmentation of objects from a single image is a challenging problem which generally requires training on large number of images. We consider the problem of automatically segmenting only the dynamic objects from a given pair of images of a scene captured from different positions. We exploit dense correspondences along with saliency measures in order to first localize the interest points on the dynamic objects from the two images. We propose a novel approach based on techniques from computational geometry in order to automatically segment the dynamic objects from both the images using…
We present the 2018 DAVIS Challenge on Video Object Segmentation, a public competition specifically designed for the task of video object segmentation. It builds upon the DAVIS 2017 dataset, which was presented in the previous edition of the DAVIS Challenge, and added 100 videos with multiple objects per sequence to the original DAVIS 2016 dataset. Motivated by the analysis of the results of the 2017 edition, the main track of the competition will be the same than in the previous edition (segmentation given the full mask of the objects in the first frame -- semi-supervised scenario). This edit…
Boston University（波士顿大学）；American University in Cairo（开罗美国大学）；Worcester Polytechnic Institute（伍斯特理工学院）；University of Washington（华盛顿大学）；MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab（麻省理工学院-IBM沃森人工智能实验室）
Less than 35% of recyclable waste is being actually recycled in the US, which leads to increased soil and sea pollution and is one of the major concerns of environmental researchers as well as the common public. At the heart of the problem are the inefficiencies of the waste sorting process (separating paper, plastic, metal, glass, etc.) due to the extremely complex and cluttered nature of the waste stream. Recyclable waste detection poses a unique computer vision challenge as it requires detection of highly deformable and often translucent objects in cluttered scenes without the kind of conte…
This paper proposes a methodological approach with a transfer learning scheme for plastic waste bottle detection and instance segmentation using the \textit{mask region proposal convolutional neural network} (Mask R-CNN). Plastic bottles constitute one of the major pollutants posing a serious threat to the environment both in oceans and on land. The automated identification and segregation of bottles can facilitate plastic waste recycling. We prepare a custom-made dataset of 192 bottle images with pixel-by pixel-polygon annotation for the automatic segmentation task. The proposed transfer lear…
ENSTA Paris, Institut Polytechnique de Paris（巴黎理工学院巴黎高等先进技术学院）；INRIA（法国国家信息与自动化研究所）；City University of London（伦敦城市大学）
Affordances are the possibilities of actions the environment offers to the individual. Ordinary objects (hammer, knife) usually have many affordances (grasping, pounding, cutting), and detecting these allow artificial agents to understand what are their possibilities in the environment, with obvious application in Robotics. Proposed benchmarks and state-of-the-art prediction models for supervised affordance segmentation are usually modifications of popular object segmentation models such as Mask R-CNN. We observe that theoretically, these popular object segmentation methods should be sufficien…
Adobe Research（奥多比研究院）；Snapchat Research（Snapchat研究院）；University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）
Learning long-term spatial-temporal features are critical for many video analysis tasks. However, existing video segmentation methods predominantly rely on static image segmentation techniques, and methods capturing temporal dependency for segmentation have to depend on pretrained optical flow models, leading to suboptimal solutions for the problem. End-to-end sequential learning to explore spatialtemporal features for video segmentation is largely limited by the scale of available video segmentation datasets, i.e., even the largest video segmentation dataset only contains 90 short video clips…
Nara Institute of Science and Technology（奈良先端科学技术大学院大学）
Owing to human labor shortages, the automation of labor-intensive manual waste-sorting is needed. The goal of automating waste-sorting is to replace the human role of robust detection and agile manipulation of waste items with robots. To achieve this, we propose three methods. First, we provide a combined manipulation method using graspless push-and-drop and pick-and-release manipulation. Second, we provide a robotic system that can automatically collect object images to quickly train a deep neural-network model. Third, we provide a method to mitigate the differences in the appearance of targe…
Waste management is a certainly a very complex and difficult process especially in very large cities. It needs immense man power and also uses up other resources such as electricity and fuel. This creates a need to use a novel method with help of latest technologies. Here in this article we present a new waste classification technique using Computer Vision (CV) and deep learning (DL). To further improve waste classification ability, support machine vectors (SVM) are used. We also decompose the degradable waste with help of rapid composting. In this article we have mainly worked on segregation …
Waste recycling is an important way of saving energy and materials in the production process. In general cases recyclable objects are mixed with unrecyclable objects, which raises a need for identification and classification. This paper proposes a convolutional neural network (CNN) model to complete both tasks. The model uses transfer learning from a pretrained Resnet-50 CNN to complete feature extraction. A subsequent fully connected layer for classification was trained on the augmented TrashNet dataset [1]. In the application, sliding-window is used for image segmentation in the pre-classifi…
The University of Western Ontario（西安大略大学）；Lawson Health Research Institute（劳森健康研究所）
Direct methods have recently emerged as an effective and efficient tool in automated medical image analysis and become a trend to solve diverse challenging tasks in clinical practise. Compared to traditional methods, direct methods are of much more clinical significance by straightly targeting to the final clinical goal rather than relying on any intermediate steps. These intermediate steps, e.g., segmentation, registration and tracking, are actually not necessary and only limited to very constrained tasks far from being used in practical clinical applications; moreover they are computationall…
Alibaba Youku Cognitive and Intelligent Lab（阿里巴巴优酷认知与智能实验室）；University of Oxford（牛津大学）
In this work we present SwiftNet for real-time semisupervised video object segmentation (one-shot VOS), which reports 77.8% J &F and 70 FPS on DAVIS 2017 validation dataset, leading all present solutions in overall accuracy and speed performance. We achieve this by elaborately compressing spatiotemporal redundancy in matching-based VOS via Pixel-Adaptive Memory (PAM). Temporally, PAM adaptively triggers memory updates on frames where objects display noteworthy inter-frame variations. Spatially, PAM selectively performs memory update and match on dynamic pixels while ignoring the static ones, s…
This paper presents an AI system applied to location and robotic grasping. Experimental setup is based on a parameter study to train a deep-learning network based on Mask-RCNN to perform waste location in indoor and outdoor environment, using five different classes and generating a new waste dataset. Initially the AI system obtain the RGBD data of the environment, followed by the detection of objects using the neural network. Later, the 3D object shape is computed using the network result and the depth channel. Finally, the shape is used to compute grasping for a robot arm with a two-finger gr…
We present an approach for object segmentation in videos that combines frame-level object detection with concepts from object tracking and motion segmentation. The approach extracts temporally consistent object tubes based on an off-the-shelf detector. Besides the class label for each tube, this provides a location prior that is independent of motion. For the final video segmentation, we combine this information with motion cues. The method overcomes the typical problems of weakly supervised/unsupervised video segmentation, such as scenes with no motion, dominant camera motion, and objects tha…
First Lessons Learned of an Artificial Intelligence Robotic System for Autonomous Coarse Waste Recycling Using Multispectral Imaging-Based Methods
Hamburg University of Applied Sciences（汉堡应用技术大学）；University of the West of Scotland（西苏格兰大学）；Institute for Energy, Recycling and Environmental Protection at Bremen University of Applied Sciences（不来梅应用技术大学能源、回收与环境保护研究所）；German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence（德国人工智能研究中心）
Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）；Horizon Robotics（地平线机器人）
Video object segmentation (VOS) aims at pixel-level object tracking given only the annotations in the first frame. Due to the large visual variations of objects in video and the lack of training samples, it remains a difficult task despite the upsurging development of deep learning. Toward solving the VOS problem, we bring in several new insights by the proposed unified framework consisting of object proposal, tracking and segmentation components. The object proposal network transfers objectness information as generic knowledge into VOS; the tracking network identifies the target object from t…
University of Southern California（南加州大学）；National Taiwan University（国立台湾大学）
One major technique debt in video object segmentation is to label the object masks for training instances. As a result, we propose to prepare inexpensive, yet high quality pseudo ground truth corrected with motion cue for video object segmentation training. Our method conducts semantic segmentation using instance segmentation networks and, then, selects the segmented object of interest as the pseudo ground truth based on the motion information. Afterwards, the pseudo ground truth is exploited to finetune the pretrained objectness network to facilitate object segmentation in the remaining frame…
The existing segmentation techniques require high-fidelity images as input to perform semantic segmentation. Since the segmentation results contain most of edge information that is much less than the acquired images, the throughput gap leads to both hardware and software waste. In this letter, we report an image-free single-pixel segmentation technique. The technique combines structured illumination and single-pixel detection together, to efficiently samples and multiplexes scene's segmentation information into compressed one-dimensional measurements. The illumination patterns are optimized to…
We address semi-supervised video object segmentation, the task of automatically generating accurate and consistent pixel masks for objects in a video sequence, given the first-frame ground truth annotations. Towards this goal, we present the PReMVOS algorithm (Proposal-generation, Refinement and Merging for Video Object Segmentation). Our method separates this problem into two steps, first generating a set of accurate object segmentation mask proposals for each video frame and then selecting and merging these proposals into accurate and temporally consistent pixel-wise object tracks over a vid…
Rutgers University（罗格斯大学）；Tencent Hippocrates Research Labs（腾讯希波克拉底研究实验室）；Lieber Institute for Brain Development（利伯大脑发育研究所）
Instance segmentation of biological images is essential for studying object behaviors and properties. The challenges, such as clustering, occlusion, and adhesion problems of the objects, make instance segmentation a non-trivial task. Current box-free instance segmentation methods typically rely on local pixel-level information. Due to a lack of global object view, these methods are prone to over- or under-segmentation. On the contrary, the box-based instance segmentation methods incorporate object detection into the segmentation, performing better in identifying the individual instances. In th…
In this paper we present our system for human-in-the-loop video object segmentation. The backbone of our system is a method for one-shot video object segmentation. While fast, this method requires an accurate pixel-level segmentation of one (or several) frames as input. As manually annotating such a segmentation is impractical, we propose a deep interactive image segmentation method, that can accurately segment objects with only a handful of clicks. On the GrabCut dataset, our method obtains 90% IOU with just 3.8 clicks on average, setting the new state of the art. Furthermore, as our method i…
We present an approach to semi-supervised video object segmentation, in the context of the DAVIS 2017 challenge. Our approach combines category-based object detection, category-independent object appearance segmentation and temporal object tracking. We are motivated by the fact that the objects semantic category tends not to change throughout the video while its appearance and location can vary considerably. In order to capture the specific object appearance independent of its category, for each video we train a fully convolutional network using augmentations of the given annotated frame. We r…
Compared with common image segmentation tasks targeted at low-resolution images, higher resolution detailed image segmentation receives much less attention. In this paper, we propose and study a task named Meticulous Object Segmentation (MOS), which is focused on segmenting well-defined foreground objects with elaborate shapes in high resolution images (e.g. 2k - 4k). To this end, we propose the MeticulousNet which leverages a dedicated decoder to capture the object boundary details. Specifically, we design a Hierarchical Point-wise Refining (HierPR) block to better delineate object boundaries…
Object co-segmentation is the task of segmenting the same objects from multiple images. In this paper, we propose the Attention Based Object Co-Segmentation for object co-segmentation that utilize a novel attention mechanism in the bottleneck layer of deep neural network for the selection of semantically related features. Furthermore, we take the benefit of attention learner and propose an algorithm to segment multi-input images in linear time complexity. Experiment results demonstrate that our model achieves state of the art performance on multiple datasets, with a significant reduction of co…
This paper presents a method for automatic video object segmentation based on the fusion of motion stream, appearance stream, and instance-aware segmentation. The proposed scheme consists of a two-stream fusion network and an instance segmentation network. The two-stream fusion network again consists of motion and appearance stream networks, which extract long-term temporal and spatial information, respectively. Unlike the existing two-stream fusion methods, the proposed fusion network blends the two streams at the original resolution for obtaining accurate segmentation boundary. We develop a …
Class-agnostic object proposal generation is an important first step in many object detection pipelines. However, object proposals of modern systems are rather inaccurate in terms of segmentation and only roughly adhere to object boundaries. Since typical refinement steps are usually not applicable to thousands of proposals, we propose a superpixel-based refinement system for object proposal generation systems. Utilizing precise superpixels and superpixel pooling on deep features, we refine initial coarse proposals in an end-to-end learned system. Furthermore, we propose a novel DeepFH segment…
University of Alberta（阿尔伯塔大学）；Indian Institute of Science (IISc)（印度科学学院（IISc））；ElementAI；HiSilicon, Huawei Research（华为海思研究部）
Conventional few-shot object segmentation methods learn object segmentation from a few labelled support images with strongly labelled segmentation masks. Recent work has shown to perform on par with weaker levels of supervision in terms of scribbles and bounding boxes. However, there has been limited attention given to the problem of few-shot object segmentation with image-level supervision. We propose a novel multi-modal interaction module for few-shot object segmentation that utilizes a co-attention mechanism using both visual and word embeddings. It enables our model to achieve 5.1% improve…
