Condition-Invariant and Compact Visual Place Description by Convolutional AutoencoderHanjing Ye, Weinan Chen, Jingwen Yu et al.
Visual place recognition (VPR) in condition-varying environments is still an open problem. Popular solutions are CNN-based image descriptors, which have been shown to outperform traditional image descriptors based on hand-crafted visual features. However, there are two drawbacks of current CNN-based descriptors: a) their high dimension and b) lack of generalization, leading to low efficiency and poor performance in applications. In this paper, we propose to use a convolutional autoencoder (CAE) to tackle this problem. We employ a high-level layer of a pre-trained CNN to generate features, and train a CAE to map the features to a low-dimensional space to improve the condition invariance property of the descriptor and reduce its dimension at the same time. We verify our method in three challenging datasets involving significant illumination changes, and our method is shown to be superior to the state-of-the-art. For the benefit of the community, we make public the source code.
5.3ROOct 27, 2021
Relationship Oriented Affordance Learning through Manipulation Graph ConstructionChao Tang, Jingwen Yu, Weinan Chen et al.
In this paper, we propose Manipulation Relationship Graph (MRG), a novel affordance representation which captures the underlying manipulation relationships of an arbitrary scene. To construct such a graph from raw visual observations, a deep nerual network named AR-Net is introduced. It consists of an Attribute module and a Context module, which guide the relationship learning at object and subgraph level respectively. We quantitatively validate our method on a novel manipulation relationship dataset named SMRD. To evaluate the performance of the proposed model and representation, both visual perception and physical manipulation experiments are conducted. Overall, AR-Net along with MRG outperforms all baselines, achieving the success rate of 88.89% on task relationship recognition (TRR) and 73.33% on task completion (TC)