On the Illumination Influence for Object Learning on Robot Companions

Most collaborative tasks require interaction with everyday objects (e.g., utensils while cooking). Thus, robots must perceive everyday objects in an effective and efficient way. This highlights the necessity of understanding environmental factors and their impact on visual perception, such as illumination changes throughout the day on robotic systems in the real world. In object recognition, two of these factors are changes due to illumination of the scene and differences in the sensors capturing it. In this paper, we will present data augmentations for object recognition that enhance a deep learning architecture. We will show how simple linear and non-linear illumination models and feature concatenation can be used to improve deep learning-based approaches. The aim of this work is to allow for more realistic Human-Robot Interaction scenarios with a small amount of training data in combination with incremental interactive object learning. This will benefit the interaction with the robot to maximize object learning for long-term and location-independent learning in unshaped environments. With our model-based analysis, we showed that changes in illumination affect recognition approaches that use Deep Convolutional Neural Network to encode features for object recognition. Using data augmentation, we were able to show that such a system can be modified toward a more robust recognition without retraining the network. Additionally, we have shown that using simple brightness change models can help to improve the recognition across all training set sizes.