The representation is orderless and therefore is particularly useful for material and texture recognition.
Research in texture recognition often concentrates on the problem of material recognition in uncluttered conditions, an assumption rarely met by applications.
We overcome the scarce data problem intrinsic to novel materials development by coupling a supervised machine learning approach with a model-agnostic, physics-informed data augmentation strategy using simulated data from the Inorganic Crystal Structure Database (ICSD) and experimental data.
DATA AUGMENTATION INTERPRETABLE MACHINE LEARNING MATERIAL CLASSIFICATION MATERIAL RECOGNITION TIME SERIES CLASSIFICATION X-RAY DIFFRACTION (XRD)
A key concept is differential angular imaging, where small angular variations in image capture enables angular-gradient features for an enhanced appearance representation that improves recognition.
To explore this, we collected a dataset of spectral measurements from two commercially available spectrometers during which a robotic platform interacted with 50 flat material objects, and we show that a neural network model can accurately analyze these measurements.
Our approach achieves state-of-the-art results and enables a robot to estimate the material class of household objects with ~90% accuracy when 92% of the training data are unlabeled.
Finally, we present how a robot can combine this high resolution local sensing with images from the robot's head-mounted camera to achieve accurate material classification over a scene of objects on a table.