Unseen Object Amodal Instance Segmentation via Hierarchical Occlusion Modeling
This addresses the need for robotic manipulation in unstructured environments by enabling perception of occluded objects, though it is incremental as it builds on existing segmentation work.
The paper tackles the problem of segmenting unseen objects in cluttered scenes by proposing a method for amodal instance segmentation, which includes visible masks, amodal masks, and occlusions, achieving state-of-the-art performance on three benchmarks.
Instance-aware segmentation of unseen objects is essential for a robotic system in an unstructured environment. Although previous works achieved encouraging results, they were limited to segmenting the only visible regions of unseen objects. For robotic manipulation in a cluttered scene, amodal perception is required to handle the occluded objects behind others. This paper addresses Unseen Object Amodal Instance Segmentation (UOAIS) to detect 1) visible masks, 2) amodal masks, and 3) occlusions on unseen object instances. For this, we propose a Hierarchical Occlusion Modeling (HOM) scheme designed to reason about the occlusion by assigning a hierarchy to a feature fusion and prediction order. We evaluated our method on three benchmarks (tabletop, indoors, and bin environments) and achieved state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance. Robot demos for picking up occluded objects, codes, and datasets are available at https://sites.google.com/view/uoais