Point cloud registration is a crucial problem in computer vision and robotics. Existing methods either rely on matching local geometric features, which are sensitive to the pose differences, or leverage global shapes, which leads to inconsistency when facing distribution variances such as partial overlapping. Combining the advantages of both types of methods, we adopt a coarse-to-fine pipeline that concurrently handles both issues. We first reduce the pose differences between input point clouds by aligning global features; then we match the local features to further refine the inaccurate alignments resulting from distribution variances. As global feature alignment requires the features to preserve the poses of input point clouds and local feature matching expects the features to be invariant to these poses, we propose an SE(3)-equivariant feature extractor to simultaneously generate two types of features. In this feature extractor, representations that preserve the poses are first encoded by our novel SE(3)-equivariant network and then converted into pose-invariant ones by a pose-detaching module. Experiments demonstrate that our proposed method increases the recall rate by 20% compared to state-of-the-art methods when facing both pose differences and distribution variances.

Robotic peg-in-hole assembly remains a challenging task due to its high accuracy demand. Previous work tends to simplify the problem by restricting the degree of freedom of the end-effector, or limiting the distance between the target and the initial pose position, which prevents them from being deployed in real-world manufacturing. Thus, we present a Coarse-to-Fine Visual Servoing (CFVS) peg-in-hole method, achieving 6-DoF end-effector motion control based on 3D visual feedback. CFVS can handle arbitrary tilt angles and large initial alignment errors through a fast pose estimation before refinement. Furthermore, by introducing a confidence map to ignore the irrelevant contour of objects, CFVS is robust against noise and can deal with various targets beyond training data. Extensive experiments show CFVS outperforms state-of-the-art methods and obtains 100%, 91%, and 82% average success rates in 3-DoF, 4-DoF, and 6-DoF peg-in-hole, respectively.

While recent progress has significantly boosted few-shot classification (FSC) performance, few-shot object detection (FSOD) remains challenging for modern learning systems. Existing FSOD systems follow FSC approaches, ignoring critical issues such as spatial variability and uncertain representations, and consequently result in low performance. Observing this, we propose a novelDual-Awareness Attention (DAnA)mechanism that enables networks to adaptively interpret the given support images. DAnA transforms support images intoquery-position-aware(QPA) features, guiding detection networks precisely by assigning customized support information to each local region of the query. In addition, the proposed DAnA component is flexible and adaptable to multiple existing object detection frameworks. By adopting DAnA, conventional object detection networks, Faster R-CNN and RetinaNet, which are not designed explicitly for few-shot learning, reach state-of-the-art performance in FSOD tasks. In comparison with previous methods, our model significantly increases the performance by 47% (+6.9 AP), showing remarkable ability under various evaluation settings.

Object detection plays a deep role in visual systems by identifying instances for downstream algorithms. In industrial scenarios, however, a slight change in manufacturing systems would lead to costly data re-collection and human annotation processes to re-train models. Existing solutions such as semi-supervised and few-shot methods either rely on numerous human annotations or suffer low performance. In this work, we explore a novel object detector based on interactive perception (ODIP), which can be adapted to novel domains in an automated manner. By interacting with a grasping system, ODIP accumulates visual observations of novel objects, learning to identify previously unseen instances without humanannotated data. Extensive experiments show ODIP outperforms both the generic object detector and state-of-the-art few-shot object detector fine-tuned in traditional manners. A demo video is provided to further illustrate the idea [1].