Enhancing Long-Term Re-Identification Robustness Using Synthetic Data: A Comparative Analysis

This contribution explores the impact of synthetic training data usage and the prediction of material wear and aging in the context of re-identification. Different experimental setups and gallery set expanding strategies are tested, analyzing their impact on performance over time for aging re-identification subjects. Using a continuously updating gallery, we were able to increase our mean Rank-1 accuracy by 24%, as material aging was taken into account step by step. In addition, using models trained with 10% artificial training data, Rank-1 accuracy could be increased by up to 13%, in comparison to a model trained on only real-world data, significantly boosting generalized performance on hold-out data. Finally, this work introduces a novel, open-source re-identification dataset, pallet-block-2696. This dataset contains 2,696 images of Euro pallets, taken over a period of 4 months. During this time, natural aging processes occurred and some of the pallets were damaged during their usage. These wear and tear processes significantly changed the appearance of the pallets, providing a dataset that can be used to generate synthetically aged pallets or other wooden materials.

Learning Embeddings with Centroid Triplet Loss for Object Identification in Robotic Grasping

Foundation models are a strong trend in deep learning and computer vision. These models serve as a base for applications as they require minor or no further fine-tuning by developers to integrate into their applications. Foundation models for zero-shot object segmentation such as Segment Anything (SAM) output segmentation masks from images without any further object information. When they are followed in a pipeline by an object identification model, they can perform object detection without training. Here, we focus on training such an object identification model. A crucial practical aspect for an object identification model is to be flexible in input size. As object identification is an image retrieval problem, a suitable method should handle multi-query multi-gallery situations without constraining the number of input images (e.g. by having fixed-size aggregation layers). The key solution to train such a model is the centroid triplet loss (CTL), which aggregates image features to their centroids. CTL yields high accuracy, avoids misleading training signals and keeps the model input size flexible. In our experiments, we establish a new state of the art on the ArmBench object identification task, which shows general applicability of our model. We furthermore demonstrate an integrated unseen object detection pipeline on the challenging HOPE dataset, which requires fine-grained detection. There, our pipeline matches and surpasses related methods which have been trained on dataset-specific data.