A Cascaded Information Interaction Network for Precise Image Segmentation

Visual perception plays a pivotal role in enabling autonomous behavior, offering a cost-effective and efficient alternative to complex multi-sensor systems. However, robust segmentation remains a challenge in complex scenarios. To address this, this paper proposes a cascaded convolutional neural network integrated with a novel Global Information Guidance Module. This module is designed to effectively fuse low-level texture details with high-level semantic features across multiple layers, thereby overcoming the inherent limitations of single-scale feature extraction. This architectural innovation significantly enhances segmentation accuracy, particularly in visually cluttered or blurred environments where traditional methods often fail. Experimental evaluations on benchmark image segmentation datasets demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves superior precision, outperforming existing state-of-the-art methods. The results highlight the effectiveness of the approach and its promising potential for deployment in practical robotic applications.

Designing Pin-pression Gripper and Learning its Dexterous Grasping with Online In-hand Adjustment

We introduce a novel design of parallel-jaw grippers drawing inspiration from pin-pression toys. The proposed pin-pression gripper features a distinctive mechanism in which each finger integrates a 2D array of pins capable of independent extension and retraction. This unique design allows the gripper to instantaneously customize its finger's shape to conform to the object being grasped by dynamically adjusting the extension/retraction of the pins. In addition, the gripper excels in in-hand re-orientation of objects for enhanced grasping stability again via dynamically adjusting the pins. To learn the dynamic grasping skills of pin-pression grippers, we devise a dedicated reinforcement learning algorithm with careful designs of state representation and reward shaping. To achieve a more efficient grasp-while-lift grasping mode, we propose a curriculum learning scheme. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that our design, together with the learned skills, leads to highly flexible and robust grasping with much stronger generality to unseen objects than alternatives. We also highlight encouraging physical results of sim-to-real transfer on a physically manufactured pin-pression gripper, demonstrating the practical significance of our novel gripper design and grasping skill. Demonstration videos for this paper are available at https://github.com/siggraph-pin-pression-gripper/pin-pression-gripper-video.

Cascaded Interaction with Eroded Deep Supervision for Salient Object Detection

Deep convolutional neural networks have been widely applied in salient object detection and have achieved remarkable results in this field. However, existing models suffer from information distortion caused by interpolation during up-sampling and down-sampling. In response to this drawback, this article starts from two directions in the network: feature and label. On the one hand, a novel cascaded interaction network with a guidance module named global-local aligned attention (GAA) is designed to reduce the negative impact of interpolation on the feature side. On the other hand, a deep supervision strategy based on edge erosion is proposed to reduce the negative guidance of label interpolation on lateral output. Extensive experiments on five popular datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method.