Enhancing Transparent Object Pose Estimation: A Fusion of GDR-Net and Edge Detection

Object pose estimation of transparent objects remains a challenging task in the field of robot vision due to the immense influence of lighting, background, and reflections. However, the edges of clear objects have the highest contrast, which leads to stable and prominent features. We propose a novel approach by incorporating edge detection in a pre-processing step for the tasks of object detection and object pose estimation. We conducted experiments to investigate the effect of edge detectors on transparent objects. We examine the performance of the state-of-the-art 6D object pose estimation pipeline GDR-Net and the object detector YOLOX when applying different edge detectors as pre-processing steps (i.e., Canny edge detection with and without color information, and holistically-nested edges (HED)). We evaluate the physically-based rendered dataset Trans6D-32 K of transparent objects with parameters proposed by the BOP Challenge. Our results indicate that applying edge detection as a pre-processing enhances performance for certain objects.

STAR: Shape-focused Texture Agnostic Representations for Improved Object Detection and 6D Pose Estimation

Recent advances in machine learning have greatly benefited object detection and 6D pose estimation for robotic grasping. However, textureless and metallic objects still pose a significant challenge due to fewer visual cues and the texture bias of CNNs. To address this issue, we propose a texture-agnostic approach that focuses on learning from CAD models and emphasizes object shape features. To achieve a focus on learning shape features, the textures are randomized during the rendering of the training data. By treating the texture as noise, the need for real-world object instances or their final appearance during training data generation is eliminated. The TLESS and ITODD datasets, specifically created for industrial settings in robotics and featuring textureless and metallic objects, were used for evaluation. Texture agnosticity also increases the robustness against image perturbations such as imaging noise, motion blur, and brightness changes, which are common in robotics applications. Code and datasets are publicly available at github.com/hoenigpeter/randomized_texturing.