Papers › Persistent Homology Meets Object Unity: Object Recognition in Clutter

Persistent Homology Meets Object Unity: Object Recognition in Clutter

5 May 2023arXiv:2305.03815archive 2025-07-28

Ekta U. Samani, Ashis G. Banerjee

Recognition of occluded objects in unseen and unstructured indoor environments is a challenging problem for mobile robots. To address this challenge, we propose a new descriptor, TOPS, for point clouds generated from depth images and an accompanying recognition framework, THOR, inspired by human reasoning. The descriptor employs a novel slicing-based approach to compute topological features from filtrations of simplicial complexes using persistent homology, and facilitates reasoning-based recognition using object unity. Apart from a benchmark dataset, we report performance on a new dataset, the UW Indoor Scenes (UW-IS) Occluded dataset, curated using commodity hardware to reflect real-world scenarios with different environmental conditions and degrees of object occlusion. THOR outperforms state-of-the-art methods on both the datasets and achieves substantially higher recognition accuracy for all the scenarios of the UW-IS Occluded dataset. Therefore, THOR, is a promising step toward robust recognition in low-cost robots, meant for everyday use in indoor settings.

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ObjectObject RecognitionUnity

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UW Indoor Scenes (UW-IS) Occluded dataset

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