A robot usually adopts ANN (artificial neural network)-based object detection and instance segmentation algorithms to recognize objects but creating datasets for these algorithms requires high labeling costs because the dataset should be manually labeled. In order to lower the labeling cost, a new scheme is proposed that can automatically generate a training images and label them for specific objects. This scheme uses an instance segmentation algorithm trained to give the masks of unknown objects, so that they can be obtained in a simple environment. The RGB images of objects can be obtained by using these masks, and it is necessary to label the classes of objects through a human supervision. After obtaining object images, they are synthesized with various background images to create new images. Labeling the synthesized images is performed automatically using the masks and previously input object classes. In addition, human intervention is further reduced by using the robot arm to collect object images. The experiments show that the performance of instance segmentation trained through the proposed method is equivalent to that of the real dataset and that the time required to generate the dataset can be significantly reduced.

We present a region-based approach for accurate pose estimation of small mechanical components. Our algorithm consists of two key phases: Multi-view object co-segmentation and pose estimation. In the first phase, we explain an automatic method to extract binary masks of a target object captured from multiple viewpoints. For initialization, we assume the target object is bounded by the convex volume of interest defined by a few user inputs. The co-segmented target object shares the same geometric representation in space, and has distinctive color models from those of the backgrounds. In the second phase, we retrieve a 3D model instance with correct upright orientation, and estimate a relative pose of the object observed from images. Our energy function, combining region and boundary terms for the proposed measures, maximizes the overlapping regions and boundaries between the multi-view co-segmentations and projected masks of the reference model. Based on high-quality co-segmentations consistent across all different viewpoints, our final results are accurate model indices and pose parameters of the extracted object. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method using various examples.