RoCap: A Robotic Data Collection Pipeline for the Pose Estimation of Appearance-Changing Objects

Object pose estimation plays a vital role in mixed-reality interactions when users manipulate tangible objects as controllers. Traditional vision-based object pose estimation methods leverage 3D reconstruction to synthesize training data. However, these methods are designed for static objects with diffuse colors and do not work well for objects that change their appearance during manipulation, such as deformable objects like plush toys, transparent objects like chemical flasks, reflective objects like metal pitchers, and articulated objects like scissors. To address this limitation, we propose Rocap, a robotic pipeline that emulates human manipulation of target objects while generating data labeled with ground truth pose information. The user first gives the target object to a robotic arm, and the system captures many pictures of the object in various 6D configurations. The system trains a model by using captured images and their ground truth pose information automatically calculated from the joint angles of the robotic arm. We showcase pose estimation for appearance-changing objects by training simple deep-learning models using the collected data and comparing the results with a model trained with synthetic data based on 3D reconstruction via quantitative and qualitative evaluation. The findings underscore the promising capabilities of Rocap.

ElasticPlay: Interactive Video Summarization with Dynamic Time Budgets

Video consumption is being shifted from sit-and-watch to selective skimming. Existing video player interfaces, however, only provide indirect manipulation to support this emerging behavior. Video summarization alleviates this issue to some extent, shortening a video based on the desired length of a summary as an input variable. But an optimal length of a summarized video is often not available in advance. Moreover, the user cannot edit the summary once it is produced, limiting its practical applications. We argue that video summarization should be an interactive, mixed-initiative process in which users have control over the summarization procedure while algorithms help users achieve their goal via video understanding. In this paper, we introduce ElasticPlay, a mixed-initiative approach that combines an advanced video summarization technique with direct interface manipulation to help users control the video summarization process. Users can specify a time budget for the remaining content while watching a video; our system then immediately updates the playback plan using our proposed cut-and-forward algorithm, determining which parts to skip or to fast-forward. This interactive process allows users to fine-tune the summarization result with immediate feedback. We show that our system outperforms existing video summarization techniques on the TVSum50 dataset. We also report two lab studies (22 participants) and a Mechanical Turk deployment study (60 participants), and show that the participants responded favorably to ElasticPlay.