Multi-Modal RGB-D Scene Recognition Across Domains

Abstract

Scene recognition is one of the basic problems in computer vision research with extensive applications in robotics. When available, depth images provide helpful geometric cues that complement the RGB texture information and help to identify discriminative scene image features. Depth sensing technology developed fast in the last years and a great variety of 3D cameras have been introduced, each with different acquisition properties. However, those properties are often neglected when targeting big data collections, so multi-modal images are gathered disregarding their original nature. In this work, we put under the spotlight the existence of a possibly severe domain shift issue within multi-modality scene recognition datasets. As a consequence, a scene classification model trained on one camera may not generalize on data from a different camera, only providing a low recognition performance. Starting from the well-known SUN RGB-D dataset, we designed an experimental testbed to study this problem and we use it to benchmark the performance of existing methods. Finally, we introduce a novel adaptive scene recognition approach that leverages self-supervised translation between modalities. Indeed, learning to go from RGB to depth and vice-versa is an unsupervised procedure that can be trained jointly on data of multiple cameras and may help to bridge the gap among the extracted feature distributions. Our experimental results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed approach.