Autonomous meshing, texturing and recognition of object models with a mobile robot

Abstract

We present a system for creating object models from RGB-D views acquired autonomously by a mobile robot. We create high-quality textured meshes of the objects by approximating the underlying geometry with a Poisson surface. Our system employs two optimization steps, first registering the views spatially based on image features, and second aligning the RGB images to maximize photometric consistency with respect to the reconstructed mesh. We show that the resulting models can be used robustly for recognition by training a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) on images rendered from the reconstructed meshes. We perform experiments on data collected autonomously by a mobile robot both in controlled and uncontrolled scenarios. We compare quantitatively and qualitatively to previous work to validate our approach.