What You See is Less Than What You Get - Estimating Visually Non-Observable Object Properties

The great majority of object analysis methods are based on visual object properties - objects are categorized according to how they appear in images. Visual appearance is measured in terms of image features (e.g., SIFTs) extracted from images or video. However, besides appearance, objects also have many properties that can be of interest, e.g., for a robot who wants to employ them in activities: Temperature, weight, surface softness, and also the functionalities or affordances of the object, i.e., how it is intended to be used. One example, recently addressed in the vision community, are chairs. Chairs can look vastly different, but have one thing in common: they afford sitting. At the Computer Vision and Active Perception Lab at KTH, we study the problem of inferring non-observable object properties in a number of ways. In this presentation I will describe some of this work.