Semantic Segmentation of Transparent and Opaque Drinking Glasses with the Help of Zero-shot Learning

Segmenting transparent structures in images is challenging since they are difficult to distinguish from the background. Common examples are drinking glasses, which are a ubiquitous part of our lives and appear in many different shapes and sizes. In this work we propose TransCaGNet, a modified version of the zero-shot model CaGNet. We exchange the segmentation backbone with the architecture of Trans4Trans to be capable of segmenting transparent objects. Since some glasses are rarely captured, we use zeroshot learning to be able to create semantic segmentations of glass categories not given during training. We propose a novel synthetic dataset covering a diverse set of different environmental conditions. Additionally we capture a real-world evaluation dataset since most applications take place in the real world. Comparing our model with Zeg-Clip we are able to show that TransCaGNet produces better mean IoU and accuracy values while ZegClip outperforms it mostly for unseen classes. To improve the segmentation results, we combine the semantic segmentation of the models with the segmentation results of SAM 2. Our evaluation emphasizes that distinguishing between different classes is challenging for the models due to similarity, points of view, or coverings. Taking this behavior into account, we assign glasses multiple possible categories. The modification leads to an improvement up to 13.68% for the mean IoU and up to 17.88% for the mean accuracy values on the synthetic dataset. Using our difficult synthetic dataset for training, the models produce even better results on the real-world dataset. The mean IoU is improved up to 5.55% and the mean accuracy up to 5.72% on the real-world dataset.

Transparency Distortion Robustness for SOTA Image Segmentation Tasks

Semantic Image Segmentation facilitates a multitude of real-world applications ranging from autonomous driving over industrial process supervision to vision aids for human beings. These models are usually trained in a supervised fashion using example inputs. Distribution Shifts between these examples and the inputs in operation may cause erroneous segmentations. The robustness of semantic segmentation models against distribution shifts caused by differing camera or lighting setups, lens distortions, adversarial inputs and image corruptions has been topic of recent research. However, robustness against spatially varying radial distortion effects that can be caused by uneven glass structures (e.g. windows) or the chaotic refraction in heated air has not been addressed by the research community yet. We propose a method to synthetically augment existing datasets with spatially varying distortions. Our experiments show, that these distortion effects degrade the performance of state-of-the-art segmentation models. Pretraining and enlarged model capacities proof to be suitable strategies for mitigating performance degradation to some degree, while fine-tuning on distorted images only leads to marginal performance improvements.

Influence of Water Droplet Contamination for Transparency Segmentation

Computer vision techniques are on the rise for industrial applications, like process supervision and autonomous agents, e.g., in the healthcare domain and dangerous environments. While the general usability of these techniques is high, there are still challenging real-world use-cases. Especially transparent structures, which can appear in the form of glass doors, protective casings or everyday objects like glasses, pose a challenge for computer vision methods. This paper evaluates the combination of transparent objects in conjunction with (naturally occurring) contamination through environmental effects like hazing. We introduce a novel publicly available dataset containing 489 images incorporating three grades of water droplet contamination on transparent structures and examine the resulting influence on transparency handling. Our findings show, that contaminated transparent objects are easier to segment and that we are able to distinguish between different severity levels of contamination with a current state-of-the art machine-learning model. This in turn opens up the possibility to enhance computer vision systems regarding resilience against, e.g., datashifts through contaminated protection casings or implement an automated cleaning alert.