MateRobot: Material Recognition in Wearable Robotics for People with Visual Impairments

Understand

People with Visual Impairments (PVI) typically recognize objects through haptic perception.

• Knowing objects and materials before touching is desired by the target users but under-explored in the field of human-centered robotics.
• To fill this gap, in this work, a wearable vision-based robotic system, MateRobot, is established for PVI to recognize materials and object categories beforehand.
• To address the computational constraints of mobile platforms, we propose a lightweight yet accurate model MateViT to perform pixel-wise semantic segmentation, simultaneously recognizing both objects and materials.