Title
Self-supervised Representation Learning for Reliable Robotic Monitoring of Fruit Anomalies
Abstract
Data augmentation can be a simple yet powerful tool for autonomous robots to fully utilise available data for self-supervised identification of atypical scenes or objects. State-of-the-art augmentation methods arbitrarily embed “structural” peculiarity on typical images so that classifying these artefacts can provide guidance for learning representations for the detection of anomalous visual signals. In this paper, however, we argue that learning such structure-sensitive representations can be a suboptimal approach to some classes of anomaly (e.g., unhealthy fruits) which could be better recognised by a different type of visual element such as “colour”. We thus propose Channel Randomisation as a novel data augmentation method for restricting neural networks to learn encoding of “colour irregularity” whilst predicting channel-randomised images to ultimately build reliable fruit-monitoring robots identifying atypical fruit qualities. Our experiments show that (1) this colour-based alternative can better learn representations for consistently accurate identification of fruit anomalies in various fruit species, and also, (2) unlike other methods, the validation accuracy can be utilised as a criterion for early stopping of training in practice due to positive correlation between the performance in the self-supervised colour-differentiation task and the subsequent detection rate of actual anomalous fruits. Also, the proposed approach is evaluated on a new agricultural dataset, Riseholme-2021, consisting of 3.5K strawberry images gathered by a mobile robot, which we share online to encourage active agri-robotics research.
Year
DOI
Venue
2022
10.1109/ICRA46639.2022.9811954
IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation
DocType
Volume
Issue
Conference
2022
1
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
0
0.34
0
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Taeyeong Choi103.04
Owen Would200.34
Adrian Salazar-Gomez300.34
Grzegorz Cielniak431634.34