arXiv Computer Vision

CALIPER: Metric-Grounded Model-Free Recognition of Visually Similar Industrial Parts

CALIPER is a model‑free RGB‑D framework that performs fine‑grained recognition of visually similar industrial parts by combining support‑based appearance matching with metric size evidence. Each class is onboarded from a single turntable RGB‑D video and a few labeled real images, enabling 3D reconstruction for appearance support and depth‑aligned size profiling. At inference, a YOLOv8n‑seg model localizes parts, a frozen DINOv2 backbone with an episodically trained embedding head matches support, and margin‑conditioned metric fusion selectively uses size evidence for ambiguous cases, achieving high accuracy on 18 parts and robust enrollment of unseen screws without retraining.

arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 31

SUFLECA: Scaling Up Feature Learning for CAD-to-image Alignment

SUFLECA is a weakly supervised framework that improves zero‑shot CAD‑to‑image alignment by scaling geometry‑grounded feature learning using Normalized Object Coordinates across up to 12 real and synthetic datasets. It introduces a geometrically consistent matching algorithm that reliably establishes CAD‑to‑image correspondences, enabling accurate, sub‑second alignment without iterative pose refinement. On the ScanNet25k benchmark, SUFLECA achieves 32.8%/42.6% category/instance accuracy, outperforming the strongest zero‑shot baseline by 9.7/12.5 percentage points and surpassing existing pose‑supervised methods for the first time.

By Saad Ejaz, Miguel Fernandez-Cortizas, Javier Civera, Holger Voos, Jose Luis Sanchez-Lopez
arXiv AI
Sep 7

Where Appearance Fails, Geometry Recognizes: A CAD-Free 3D Shape Prior That Complements Vision Foundation Models

The paper introduces a CAD‑free 3D shape prior that enhances object recognition by reconstructing each object with 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) from short RGB‑D scans and fusing the resulting shape prototype with frozen DINOv2 image features. Experiments on T‑LESS and HOPE datasets show that geometry alone can match or exceed CAD‑based recognition, and that the combined approach improves performance, especially on shape‑distinctive or partially occluded objects. The study demonstrates that the benefit comes from the geometric information rather than rendered pixels, and that the prior is complementary to frozen vision features.

By Chenxi Tao, Seung-Kyum Choi
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 7

DART: Depth-as-Target Pretraining for Surgical Vision Foundation Models

DART is a new RGB‑D pretraining method for surgical vision foundation models that incorporates pseudo‑labeled depth maps as a pixel‑space reconstruction target during training. By adding a depth reconstruction head to DINOv2’s masked iBOT framework, DART improves representation quality without affecting downstream RGB‑only fine‑tuning or inference. Across eight surgical benchmarks—including segmentation, depth estimation, and image‑level recognition—DART outperforms both natural‑image and in‑domain baselines, demonstrating that geometric pseudo‑labels can strengthen foundation model pretraining without extra labels or inference cost.

By John J. Han, Adam Schmidt, Muhammad Abdullah Jamal, Jie Ying Wu, Omid Mohareri
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 11

Artic-O: End-to-End Articulated Object Reconstruction via Latent Geometry Learning

Artic-O is an end‑to‑end, feed‑forward framework that reconstructs articulated objects from sparse images by learning latent geometry. It maps multi‑state observations into a pretrained latent geometry space, uses a frozen flow‑matching decoder for complete‑shape priors, and fuses visual tokens with geometry latents in an image‑grounded part‑reasoning module to segment active parts and predict articulation. Trained with a geometry‑to‑articulation curriculum and a decoupled two‑pass strategy, Artic‑O achieves high reconstruction quality and articulation accuracy while drastically reducing inference time from 9 minutes to about 0.3 seconds per object.

By Xuyang Wang, Zhenyu Li, Jian Ding, Habib Slim, Peter Wonka, Hongdong Li, Mohamed Elhoseiny
arXiv AI
Sep 4

AnyBox: Efficient Zero-Shot 9DoF Pose Estimation of Boxes for Robotic Manipulation

AnyBox is a zero‑shot framework that estimates the full 9DoF pose (6D pose plus 3D dimensions) of boxes from a single RGB‑D image, leveraging the geometric regularity of boxes. It alternates between pose and scale estimation, using a binary search guided by the discrepancy between a reprojected template and the observed mask, and employs a depth‑consistency filter and an early‑stopping rule to prune implausible hypotheses. On public benchmarks and a warehouse dataset, AnyBox improves detection AP by up to 36 points and boosts robotic box‑shelving success by 28%.

By Yintao Ma, Sajjad Pakdamansavoji, Charles Eret, Rui Heng Yang, Xuan Zhao, Yingxue Zhang, Tongtong Cao, Amir Rasouli
arXiv AI
Sep 4

Catalogue Photography as a Cold Start: Toward Deployable Carbide Burr Recognition

The paper investigates using manufacturer catalogue photography to bootstrap a computer‑vision system for recognizing carbide rotary burrs, a task that traditionally relies on manual quality checks. It shows that while frozen feature extractors struggle to separate key attributes like head shape and tooth profile, metric learning can cluster catalogue images almost perfectly, yet only about half of this performance transfers to real field photographs. The study finds that simple domain‑sensitivity reductions—such as converting images to grayscale and applying Hungarian assignment based on order sheets—yield the largest gains, suggesting catalogue images are a useful cold‑start source rather than a ready‑for‑deployment training set.

By Abilash Philip Madavath, Chandra Yuvesh Aubeeluck, Augustin Raju, Nicolas Pyschny, Felix Hackel\"oer, Florian Zwanzig
arXiv Computer Vision
4d ago

Catalogue Photography as a Cold Start: Toward Deployable Rotary Milling Tool Recognition

The paper investigates using catalogue photographs to bootstrap a computer‑vision system for recognizing rotary milling tools (carbide burrs) in industrial settings. It shows that standard frozen feature extractors fail to separate key attributes, while metric learning yields excellent clustering on catalogue images but only half the accuracy on real field photos. The study finds that simple domain‑sensitivity reductions—grayscale conversion and order‑sheet‑constrained retrieval—yield the largest transfer gains, positioning catalogue photography as a useful cold‑start rather than a ready‑to‑deploy training domain.

By Abilash Philip Madavath, Chandra Yuvesh Aubeeluck, Augustin Raju, Nicolas Pyschny, Felix Hackel\"oer, Florian Zwanzig