Small Object Discovery and Recognition Using Actively Guided Robot

Abstract

In the field of active perception, object search is a widely studied problem. To search for an object in large rooms, it would be expensive to explore and check each object's similarity with the object of interest. The expense could uncontrollably bloat as the number of objects to be searched increases. If the objects are of the order of a 2-5cm, they appear very small, making it difficult for the present algorithms to recognize them. A general human strategy in such cases is to sparsely identify, from far away (4-6m), if the object of interest is present in the scene. Subsequently, each of the possible objects is analysed from closer proximity to recognize, for further manipulation. In this work, we present a similar framework. We reduce search-space, by identifying existential probability of a small object from a distance followed by a closer 3-D analysis of its point cloud to accurately recognize it. This is achieved by 2-D modelling of the objects using Gaussian Mixture Models followed by recognizing objects using efficient RGB-Depth based algorithm.