On the impact of learning hierarchical representations for visual recognition in robotics

Recent developments in learning sophisticated, hierarchical image representations have led to remarkable progress in the context of visual recognition. While these methods are becoming standard in modern computer vision systems, they are rarely adopted in robotics. The question arises of whether solutions, which have been primarily developed for image retrieval, can perform well in more dynamic and unstructured scenarios. In this paper we tackle this question performing an extensive evaluation of state of the art methods for visual recognition on a iCub robot. We consider the problem of classifying 15 different objects shown by a human demonstrator in a challenging Human-Robot Interaction scenario. The classification performance of hierarchical learning approaches are shown to outperform benchmark solutions based on local descriptors and template matching. Our results show that hierarchical learning systems are computationally efficient and can be used for real-time training and recognition of objects.