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On Robustness of Robotic and Autonomous Systems Perception

An Assessment of Image Distortion on State-of-the-art Robotic Vision Model

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Abstract

We propose an evaluation framework that emulates poor image exposure conditions, low-range image sensors, lossy compression, as well as noise types which are common in robot vision. We present a rigorous evaluation of the robustness of several high-level image recognition models and investigate their performance under distinct image distortions. On one hand, F1 score shows that the majority of CNN models are slightly affected by mild exposure, strong compression, and Poisson Noise. On the other hand, there is a large decrease in precision and accuracy in extreme misexposure, impulse noise, or signal-dependent noise. Using the proposed framework, we obtain a detailed evaluation of a variety of traditional image distortions, typically found in robotics and automated systems pipelines, provides insights and guidance for further development. We propose a pipeline-based approach to mitigate the adverse effects of image distortions by including an image pre-processing step which intends to estimate the proper exposure and reduce noise artifacts. Moreover, we explore the impacts of the image distortions on the segmentation task, a task that plays a primary role in autonomous navigation, obstacle avoidance, object picking and other robotics tasks.

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Availability of Data and Material

The ImageNet dataset is available at http://www.image-net.org. Trained models for Mask-RCNN are available at https://github.com/matterport/Mask_RCNN. Trained models for object recognition are available at https://github.com/keras-team/keras.

Code Availability

The code to reproduce the contributions of this paper is available at GitHub https://git.io/JUgIz.

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Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge the support of NVIDIA Corporation with the donation of the Titan X Pascal GPU used for this research.

Funding

This study was financed in part by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior - Brasil (CAPES) - Finance Code 001.

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  1. NAUTEC - Intelligent Robotics and Automation Group, FURG - Universidade Federal do Rio Grande, Rio Grande, Brazil

    Cristiano Rafael Steffens, Lucas Ricardo Vieira Messias, Paulo Jorge Lilles Drews-Jr & Silvia Silva da Costa Botelho

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  1. Cristiano Rafael Steffens
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  2. Lucas Ricardo Vieira Messias
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  3. Paulo Jorge Lilles Drews-Jr
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Cristiano Rafael Steffens, Lucas Ricardo Vieira Messias, Paulo Lilles Jorge Drews-Jr, and Silvia Silva da Costa Botelho all contributed equally to the work.

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Correspondence to Cristiano Rafael Steffens.

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Steffens, C.R., Messias, L.R.V., Drews-Jr, P.J.L. et al. On Robustness of Robotic and Autonomous Systems Perception. J Intell Robot Syst 101, 61 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10846-021-01334-0

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