Deep Polarization Cues for Transparent Object Segmentation

Segmentation of transparent objects is a hard, open problem in computer vision. Transparent objects lack texture of their own, adopting instead the texture of scene background. This paper reframes the problem of transparent object segmentation into the realm of light polarization, i.e., the rotation of light waves. We use a polarization camera to capture multi-modal imagery and couple this with a unique deep learning backbone for processing polarization input data. Our method achieves instance segmentation on cluttered, transparent objects in various scene and background conditions, demonstrating an improvement over traditional image-based approaches. As an application we use this for robotic bin picking of transparent objects.