3D laser scan classification using web data and domain adaptation

Abstract

Over the last years, object recognition has become a more and more active field of research in robotics. An important problem in object recognition is the need for sufficient labeled training data to learn good classifiers. In this paper we show how to significantly reduce the need for manually labeled training data by leveraging data sets available on the World Wide Web. Specifically, we show how to use objects from Google’s 3D Warehouse to train classifiers for 3D laser scans collected by a robot navigating through urban environments. In order to deal with the different characteristics of the web data and the real robot data, we additionally use a small set of labeled 3D laser scans and perform domain adaptation. Our experiments demonstrate that additional data taken from the 3D Warehouse along with our domain adaptation greatly improves the classification accuracy on real laser scans.