Tai Hyoung Rhee

Jeongho Noh, Tai Hyoung Rhee, Eunho Lee et al.

Reliable 3D instance segmentation is fundamental to language-grounded robotic manipulation. Its critical application lies in cluttered environments, where occlusions, limited viewpoints, and noisy masks degrade perception. To address these challenges, we present Clutt3R-Seg, a zero-shot pipeline for robust 3D instance segmentation for language-grounded grasping in cluttered scenes. Our key idea is to introduce a hierarchical instance tree of semantic cues. Unlike prior approaches that attempt to refine noisy masks, our method leverages them as informative cues: through cross-view grouping and conditional substitution, the tree suppresses over- and under-segmentation, yielding view-consistent masks and robust 3D instances. Each instance is enriched with open-vocabulary semantic embeddings, enabling accurate target selection from natural language instructions. To handle scene changes during multi-stage tasks, we further introduce a consistency-aware update that preserves instance correspondences from only a single post-interaction image, allowing efficient adaptation without rescanning. Clutt3R-Seg is evaluated on both synthetic and real-world datasets, and validated on a real robot. Across all settings, it consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in cluttered and sparse-view scenarios. Even on the most challenging heavy-clutter sequences, Clutt3R-Seg achieves an AP@25 of 61.66, over 2.2x higher than baselines, and with only four input views it surpasses MaskClustering with eight views by more than 2x. The code is available at: https://github.com/jeonghonoh/clutt3r-seg.

Dong-Guw Lee, Tai Hyoung Rhee, Hyunsoo Jang et al.

Despite the inherent advantages of thermal infrared(TIR) imaging, large-scale data collection and annotation remain a major bottleneck for TIR-based perception. A practical alternative is to synthesize pseudo TIR data via image translation; however, most RGB-to-TIR approaches heavily rely on RGB-centric priors that overlook thermal physics, yielding implausible heat distributions. In this paper, we introduce TherA, a controllable RGB-to-TIR translation framework that produces diverse and thermally plausible images at both scene and object level. TherA couples TherA-VLM with a latent-diffusion-based translator. Given a single RGB image and a user-prompted condition pair, TherA-VLM yields a thermal-aware embedding that encodes scene, object, material, and heat-emission context reflecting the input scene-condition pair. Conditioning the diffusion model on this embedding enables realistic TIR synthesis and fine-grained control across time of day, weather, and object state. Compared to other baselines, TherA achieves state-of-the-art translation performance, demonstrating improved zero-shot translation performance up to 33% increase averaged across all metrics.

Tai Hyoung Rhee, Dong-guw Lee, Ayoung Kim

Thermal infrared imaging exhibits considerable potentials for robotic perception tasks, especially in environments with poor visibility or challenging lighting conditions. However, TIR images typically suffer from heavy non-uniform fixed-pattern noise, complicating tasks such as object detection, localization, and mapping. To address this, we propose a diffusion-based TIR image denoising framework leveraging latent-space representations and wavelet-domain optimization. Utilizing a pretrained stable diffusion model, our method fine-tunes the model via a novel loss function combining latent-space and discrete wavelet transform (DWT) / dual-tree complex wavelet transform (DTCWT) losses. Additionally, we implement a cascaded refinement stage to enhance fine details, ensuring high-fidelity denoising results. Experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate superior performance of our approach compared to state-of-the-art denoising methods. Furthermore, our method exhibits robust zero-shot generalization to diverse and challenging real-world TIR datasets, underscoring its effectiveness for practical robotic deployment.