Depth-aware Glass Surface Detection with Cross-modal Context Mining

Glass surfaces are becoming increasingly ubiquitous as modern buildings tend to use a lot of glass panels. This however poses substantial challenges on the operations of autonomous systems such as robots, self-driving cars and drones, as the glass panels can become transparent obstacles to the navigation.Existing works attempt to exploit various cues, including glass boundary context or reflections, as a prior. However, they are all based on input RGB images.We observe that the transmission of 3D depth sensor light through glass surfaces often produces blank regions in the depth maps, which can offer additional insights to complement the RGB image features for glass surface detection. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for glass surface detection by incorporating RGB-D information, with two novel modules: (1) a cross-modal context mining (CCM) module to adaptively learn individual and mutual context features from RGB and depth information, and (2) a depth-missing aware attention (DAA) module to explicitly exploit spatial locations where missing depths occur to help detect the presence of glass surfaces. In addition, we propose a large-scale RGB-D glass surface detection dataset, called \textit{RGB-D GSD}, for RGB-D glass surface detection. Our dataset comprises 3,009 real-world RGB-D glass surface images with precise annotations. Extensive experimental results show that our proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods.