Low to High Dimensional Modality Hallucination using Aggregated Fields of View

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel architecture for low-to-high modality hallucination in robotics, aggregating local neighborhood information to recover lost data, thereby improving system robustness in adverse conditions.

Contribution

The paper presents a new hallucination method that aggregates multiple local views to recover missing high-dimensional data from low-dimensional modalities in robotics.

Findings

Improves classification accuracy under modality loss

Reduces negative effects of modality absence in segmentation tasks

Demonstrates effectiveness on UWRGBD and NYUD datasets

Abstract

Real-world robotics systems deal with data from a multitude of modalities, especially for tasks such as navigation and recognition. The performance of those systems can drastically degrade when one or more modalities become inaccessible, due to factors such as sensors' malfunctions or adverse environments. Here, we argue modality hallucination as one effective way to ensure consistent modality availability and thereby reduce unfavorable consequences. While hallucinating data from a modality with richer information, e.g., RGB to depth, has been researched extensively, we investigate the more challenging low-to-high modality hallucination with interesting use cases in robotics and autonomous systems. We present a novel hallucination architecture that aggregates information from multiple fields of view of the local neighborhood to recover the lost information from the extant modality. The process is implemented by capturing a non-linear mapping between the data modalities and the learned mapping is used to aid the extant modality to mitigate the risk posed to the system in the adverse scenarios which involve modality loss. We also conduct extensive classification and segmentation experiments on UWRGBD and NYUD datasets and demonstrate that hallucination allays the negative effects of the modality loss. Implementation and models: https://github.com/kausic94/Hallucination