Kai Furmans

Chengzhi Wu, Kanran Zhou, Jan-Philipp Kaiser et al.

To enable automatic disassembly of different product types with uncertain conditions and degrees of wear in remanufacturing, agile production systems that can adapt dynamically to changing requirements are needed. Machine learning algorithms can be employed due to their generalization capabilities of learning from various types and variants of products. However, in reality, datasets with a diversity of samples that can be used to train models are difficult to obtain in the initial period. This may cause bad performances when the system tries to adapt to new unseen input data in the future. In order to generate large datasets for different learning purposes, in our project, we present a Blender add-on named MotorFactory to generate customized mesh models of various motor instances. MotorFactory allows to create mesh models which, complemented with additional add-ons, can be further used to create synthetic RGB images, depth images, normal images, segmentation ground truth masks, and 3D point cloud datasets with point-wise semantic labels. The created synthetic datasets may be used for various tasks including motor type classification, object detection for decentralized material transfer tasks, part segmentation for disassembly and handling tasks, or even reinforcement learning-based robotics control or view-planning.

Alexander Naumann, Felix Hertlein, Laura Dörr et al.

Computer vision applications in transportation logistics and warehousing have a huge potential for process automation. We present a structured literature review on research in the field to help leverage this potential. The literature is categorized w.r.t. the application, i.e. the task it tackles and w.r.t. the computer vision techniques that are used. Regarding applications, we subdivide the literature in two areas: Monitoring, i.e. observing and retrieving relevant information from the environment, and manipulation, where approaches are used to analyze and interact with the environment. Additionally, we point out directions for future research and link to recent developments in computer vision that are suitable for application in logistics. Finally, we present an overview of existing datasets and industrial solutions. The results of our analysis are also available online at https://a-nau.github.io/cv-in-logistics.

Alexander Naumann, Felix Hertlein, Laura Dörr et al.

We focus on enabling damage and tampering detection in logistics and tackle the problem of 3D shape reconstruction of potentially damaged parcels. As input we utilize single RGB images, which corresponds to use-cases where only simple handheld devices are available, e.g. for postmen during delivery or clients on delivery. We present a novel synthetic dataset, named Parcel3D, that is based on the Google Scanned Objects (GSO) dataset and consists of more than 13,000 images of parcels with full 3D annotations. The dataset contains intact, i.e. cuboid-shaped, parcels and damaged parcels, which were generated in simulations. We work towards detecting mishandling of parcels by presenting a novel architecture called CubeRefine R-CNN, which combines estimating a 3D bounding box with an iterative mesh refinement. We benchmark our approach on Parcel3D and an existing dataset of cuboid-shaped parcels in real-world scenarios. Our results show, that while training on Parcel3D enables transfer to the real world, enabling reliable deployment in real-world scenarios is still challenging. CubeRefine R-CNN yields competitive performance in terms of Mesh AP and is the only model that directly enables deformation assessment by 3D mesh comparison and tampering detection by comparing viewpoint invariant parcel side surface representations. Dataset and code are available at https://a-nau.github.io/parcel3d.

Alexander Naumann, Felix Hertlein, Benchun Zhou et al.

State-of-the-art approaches in computer vision heavily rely on sufficiently large training datasets. For real-world applications, obtaining such a dataset is usually a tedious task. In this paper, we present a fully automated pipeline to generate a synthetic dataset for instance segmentation in four steps. In contrast to existing work, our pipeline covers every step from data acquisition to the final dataset. We first scrape images for the objects of interest from popular image search engines and since we rely only on text-based queries the resulting data comprises a wide variety of images. Hence, image selection is necessary as a second step. This approach of image scraping and selection relaxes the need for a real-world domain-specific dataset that must be either publicly available or created for this purpose. We employ an object-agnostic background removal model and compare three different methods for image selection: Object-agnostic pre-processing, manual image selection and CNN-based image selection. In the third step, we generate random arrangements of the object of interest and distractors on arbitrary backgrounds. Finally, the composition of the images is done by pasting the objects using four different blending methods. We present a case study for our dataset generation approach by considering parcel segmentation. For the evaluation we created a dataset of parcel photos that were annotated automatically. We find that (1) our dataset generation pipeline allows a successful transfer to real test images (Mask AP 86.2), (2) a very accurate image selection process - in contrast to human intuition - is not crucial and a broader category definition can help to bridge the domain gap, (3) the usage of blending methods is beneficial compared to simple copy-and-paste. We made our full code for scraping, image composition and training publicly available at https://a-nau.github.io/parcel2d.

Etienne Hoffmann, Jan-Felix Klein, Sören Weindel et al.

While linear manufacturing relies on homogeneous materials and predefined process sequences, circular manufacturing reintroduces used products with heterogeneous and uncertain conditions. This shift demands manufacturing systems capable of handling variable product states, dynamically reconfigurable processes, and the integration of human and machine knowledge. Conventional manufacturing IT architectures, designed for stable structures and deterministic execution, are unable to meet these requirements, as they cannot adequately represent and manage the uniqueness of individual components at runtime. Following a design science methodology for developing a Cyber Physical Production System for circular manufacturing, we derive 14 requirements from five complementary perspectives. Based on these requirements, we design KAPPS, a knowledge-based architecture that uses an ontology-grounded knowledge graph as a unifying data backbone, combined with a semantic interface layer to enable consistent data and information integration, reasoning, and communication across heterogeneous systems and services, turning the knowledge graph from an integration layer into the factories authoritative write-time state. KAPPS incorporates modules for constraint enforcement and event-driven planning, enabling incremental adaptation of execution plans under uncertainty and human-machine knowledge exchange. The applicability of KAPPS is demonstrated through two implemented use cases: (i) Anomaly detection and learning through knowledge graph mediated services and (ii) runtime constraint enforcement in a modular conveyor system. Subsequently, the architecture is evaluated against the 14 requirements (ed. abstract shortened)

Alexander Naumann, Felix Hertlein, Laura Dörr et al.

Due to the steadily rising amount of valuable goods in supply chains, tampering detection for parcels is becoming increasingly important. In this work, we focus on the use-case last-mile delivery, where only a single RGB image is taken and compared against a reference from an existing database to detect potential appearance changes that indicate tampering. We propose a tampering detection pipeline that utilizes keypoint detection to identify the eight corner points of a parcel. This permits applying a perspective transformation to create normalized fronto-parallel views for each visible parcel side surface. These viewpoint-invariant parcel side surface representations facilitate the identification of signs of tampering on parcels within the supply chain, since they reduce the problem to parcel side surface matching with pair-wise appearance change detection. Experiments with multiple classical and deep learning-based change detection approaches are performed on our newly collected TAMpering detection dataset for PARcels, called TAMPAR. We evaluate keypoint and change detection separately, as well as in a unified system for tampering detection. Our evaluation shows promising results for keypoint (Keypoint AP 75.76) and tampering detection (81% accuracy, F1-Score 0.83) on real images. Furthermore, a sensitivity analysis for tampering types, lens distortion and viewing angles is presented. Code and dataset are available at https://a-nau.github.io/tampar.

Alexander Naumann, Laura Dörr, Niels Ole Salscheider et al.

Recent advances in the area of plane segmentation from single RGB images show strong accuracy improvements and now allow a reliable segmentation of indoor scenes into planes. Nonetheless, fine-grained details of these segmentation masks are still lacking accuracy, thus restricting the usability of such techniques on a larger scale in numerous applications, such as inpainting for Augmented Reality use cases. We propose a post-processing algorithm to align the segmented plane masks with edges detected in the image. This allows us to increase the accuracy of state-of-the-art approaches, while limiting ourselves to cuboid-shaped objects. Our approach is motivated by logistics, where this assumption is valid and refined planes can be used to perform robust object detection without the need for supervised learning. Results for two baselines and our approach are reported on our own dataset, which we made publicly available. The results show a consistent improvement over the state-of-the-art. The influence of the prior segmentation and the edge detection is investigated and finally, areas for future research are proposed.