MMSS: Multi-modal Sharable and Specific Feature Learning for RGB-D Object Recognition

Most of the feature-learning methods for RGB-D object recognition either learn features from color and depth modalities separately, or simply treat RGB-D as undifferentiated four-channel data, which cannot adequately exploit the relationship between different modalities. Motivated by the intuition that different modalities should contain not only some modal-specific patterns but also some shared common patterns, we propose a multi-modal feature learning framework for RGB-D object recognition. We first construct deep CNN layers for color and depth separately, and then connect them with our carefully designed multi-modal layers, which fuse color and depth information by enforcing a common part to be shared by features of different modalities. In this way, we obtain features reflecting shared properties as well as modal-specific properties in different modalities. The information of the multi-modal learning frameworks is back-propagated to the early CNN layers. Experimental results show that our proposed multi-modal feature learning method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches on two widely used RGB-D object benchmark datasets.