Novel Instance Detection and Segmentation (NIDS) aims at detecting and segmenting novel object instances given a few examples of each instance. We propose a unified, simple, yet effective framework (NIDS-Net) comprising object proposal generation, embedding creation for both instance templates and proposal regions, and embedding matching for instance label assignment. Leveraging recent advancements in large vision methods, we utilize Grounding DINO and Segment Anything Model (SAM) to obtain object proposals with accurate bounding boxes and masks. Central to our approach is the generation of high-quality instance embeddings. We utilize foreground feature averages of patch embeddings from the DINOv2 ViT backbone, followed by refinement through a weight adapter mechanism that we introduce.We show experimentally that our weight adapter can adjust the embeddings locally within their feature space and effectively limit overfitting in the few-shot setting. Furthermore, the weight adapter optimizes weights to enhance the distinctiveness of instance embeddings during similarity computation. This methodology enables a straightforward matching strategy that results in significant performance gains. Our framework surpasses current state-of-the-art methods, demonstrating notable improvements in four detection datasets. In the segmentation tasks on seven core datasets of the BOP challenge, our method outperforms the leading published RGB methods and remains competitive with the best RGB-D method. We have also verified our method using real-world images from a Fetch robot and a RealSense camera.1

We present a new reproducible benchmark for evaluating robot manipulation in the real world, specifically focusing on a pick-and-place task. Our benchmark uses the YCB object set, a commonly used dataset in the robotics community, to ensure that our results are comparable to other studies. Additionally, the benchmark is designed to be easily reproducible in the real world, making it accessible to researchers and practitioners. We also provide our experimental results and analyzes for model-based and model-free 6D robotic grasping on the benchmark, where representative algorithms are evaluated for object perception, grasping planning, and motion planning. We believe that our benchmark will be a valuable tool for advancing the field of robot manipulation. By providing a standardized evaluation framework, researchers can more easily compare different techniques and algorithms, leading to faster progress in developing robot manipulation methods.1

We propose a novel framework for few-shot learning by leveraging large-scale vision-language models such as CLIP [1]. Motivated by unimodal prototypical networks for few-shot learning, we introduce Proto-CLIP which utilizes image prototypes and text prototypes for few-shot learning. Specifically, Proto-CLIP adapts the image and text encoder embeddings from CLIP in a joint fashion using few-shot examples. The embeddings from the two encoders are used to compute the respective prototypes of image classes for classification. During adaptation, we propose aligning the image and text prototypes of the corresponding classes. Such alignment is beneficial for few-shot classification due to the reinforced contributions from both types of prototypes. Proto-CLIP has both training-free and fine-tuned variants. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method by conducting experiments on benchmark datasets for few-shot learning, as well as in the real world for robot perception1.

We introduce the Few-Shot Object Learning (FEWSOL) dataset for object recognition with a few images per object. We captured 336 real-world objects with 9 RGB-D images per object from different views. Fewsol has object segmentation masks, poses, and attributes. In addition, synthetic images generated using 330 3D object models are used to augment the dataset. We investigated (i) few-shot object classification and (ii) joint object segmentation and few-shot classification with state-of-the-art methods for few-shot learning and meta-learning using our dataset. The evaluation results show the presence of a large margin to be improved for few-shot object classification in robotic environments, and our dataset can be used to study and enhance few-shot object recognition for robot perception11Dataset and code available at https://irvlutd.github.io/FewSOL.

Edge nodes are crucial for detection against multitudes of cyber attacks on Internet-of-Things endpoints and is set to become part of a multi-billion industry. The resource constraints in this novel network infrastructure tier constricts the deployment of existing Network Intrusion Detection System with Deep Learning models (DLM). We address this issue by developing a novel light, fast and accurate `Edge-Detect' model, which detects Distributed Denial of Service attack on edge nodes using DLM techniques. Our model can work within resource restrictions i.e. low power, memory and processing capabilities, to produce accurate results at a meaningful pace. It is built by creating layers of Long Short-Term Memory or Gated Recurrent Unit based cells, which are known for their excellent representation of sequential data. We designed a practical data science pipeline with Recurring Neural Network to learn from the network packet behavior in order to identify whether it is normal or attack-oriented. The model evaluation is from deployment on actual edge node represented by Raspberry Pi using current cybersecurity dataset (UNSW2015). Our results demonstrate that in comparison to conventional DLM techniques, our model maintains a high testing accuracy of ~99% even with lower resource utilization in terms of cpu and memory. In addition, it is nearly 3 times smaller in size than the state-of-art model and yet requires a much lower testing time.