Real-Time Marker Localization Learning for GelStereo Tactile Sensing

Abstract: Visuotactile sensing technology is becoming more popular in tactile sensing, but the effectiveness of the existing marker detection localization methods remains to be further explored. Instead of contour-based blob detection, this paper presents a learning-based marker localization network for GelStereo visuotactile sensing called Marknet. Specifically, the Marknet presents a grid regression architecture to incorporate the distribution of the GelStereo markers. Furthermore, a marker rationality evaluator (MRE) is modelled to screen suitable prediction results. The experimental results show that the Marknet combined with MRE achieves 93.90% precision for irregular markers in contact areas, which outperforms the traditional contour-based blob detection method by a large margin of 42.32%. Meanwhile, the proposed learning-based marker localization method can achieve better real-time performance beyond the blob detection interface provided by the OpenCV library through GPU acceleration, which we believe will lead to considerable perceptual sensitivity gains in various robotic manipulation tasks.