RGB-D object recognition using deep convolutional neural networks

Abstract

We address the problem of object recognition from RGB-D images using deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs). We advocate the use of 3D CNNs to fully exploit the 3D spatial information in depth images as well as the use of pretrained 2D CNNs to learn features from RGB-D images. There exists currently no large scale dataset available comprising depth information as compared to those for RGB data. Hence transfer learning from 2D source data is key to be able to train deep 3D CNNs. To this end, we propose a hybrid 2D/3D convolutional neural network that can be initialized with pretrained 2D CNNs and can then be trained over a relatively small RGB-D dataset. We conduct experiments on the Washington dataset involving RGB-D images of small household objects. Our experiments show that the features learnt from this hybrid structure, when fused with the features learnt from depth-only and RGB-only architectures, outperform the state of the art on RGB-D category recognition.