Learning Depth-Aware Deep Representations for Robotic Perception

Exploiting RGB-D data by means of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) is at the core of a number of robotics applications, including object detection, scene semantic segmentation, and grasping. Most existing approaches, however, exploit RGB-D data by simply considering depth as an additional input channel for the network. In this paper we show that the performance of deep architectures can be boosted by introducing DaConv, a novel, general-purpose CNN block which exploits depth to learn scale-aware feature representations. We demonstrate the benefits of DaConv on a variety of robotics oriented tasks, involving affordance detection, object coordinate regression, and contour detection in RGB-D images. In each of these experiments we show the potential of the proposed block and how it can be readily integrated into existing CNN architectures.