Authors: Jonas Li, Michelle Li, Luke Liu, Xiaohui Yuan, Heng Fan
Organizations: Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of North Texas, Denton, TX 76203, USA
Abstract
Liquids like water, wine and medicine are everywhere. However, limited attention has been given to the task of segmenting liquids, hindering the ability of robots to safely avoid and interact with them. The segmentation of liquids is difficult because liquids come in diverse appearances and shapes; moreover, they can be both transparent or reflective, taking on arbitrary objects and scenes from their background and surroundings. To take on this challenge, we construct a liquid dataset, LQDS, consisting of 5000 real-world images annotated into 14 distinct classes, and design a novel liquid detection model, LQDM, which leverages cross-attention between a dedicated boundary branch and the main segmentation branch to enhance mask predictions. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of LQDM on the testing set of LQDS, outperforming state-of-the-art methods to establish a strong baseline for the semantic segmentation of liquids. We believe that LQDS and LQDM will facilitate future research in liquid segmentation and enable practical applications in robotics. Our dataset and code is released at https://lonaslee.github.io/LQDM/.
Reliable object perception is necessary for general-purpose service robots. Open-vocabulary detectors struggle to generalize beyond a few classes and fully supervised training of object detectors requires time-intensive annotations. We present a semi-supervised label propagation approach for household object segmentation. A segment proposer generates class-agnostic masks, and an ensemble of Hopfield networks assigns labels by learning representative embeddings in complementary foundation model embedding spaces (CLIP, ViT, Theia). Our approach scales to 50 object classes with limited annotation overhead and can automatically label 60% of the data in a RoboCup@Home setting, where preparation time is severely constrained. Dataset and code are publicly available at https://github.com/ais-bonn/label_propagation.
This paper presents an edge-aware instance segmentation framework that enables real-time robotic collision avoidance with transparent laboratory glassware using purely visual perception. Transparent vessels defy conventional segmentation due to refraction, specular reflection, and the absence of stable interior texture, yet their boundary contours remain comparatively reliable visual cues. Exploiting this observation, we augment a one-stage real-time instance segmentation backbone with a lightweight edge-detection branch, edge-guided attention fusion, and a parameter-free SimAM module, and further construct LabGlass-IS, a 3485-image, 21-category instance segmentation dataset of real laboratory glassware. The enhanced model achieves the highest Boundary F-score of 97.80 among compared methods, outperforming the YOLO-prompted FastSAM framework by 18.93 BF points. Furthermore, it maintains an inference speed of 7.1ms per frame and requires only 2.85% of the parameters of the closest accuracy competitor. Multi-view triangulation of mask centroids further provides 3D positions for conservative bounding-volume collision constraints. Real-robot trials achieve a 93.3% collision avoidance success rate, indicating the feasibility of the proposed perception-to-action pipeline for robot collision avoidance among fragile transparent objects. Our code is available at https://github.com/havishamy/TransYOLO_3D. Our video is available at https://havishamy.github.io/paper-videos/.
We present \textbf{LlamaSeg}, a visual autoregressive framework that unifies multiple image segmentation tasks via natural language instructions. By reformulating segmentation as visual generation, LlamaSeg encodes masks as visual tokens and uses a LLaMA-style Transformer for direct next-token prediction, naturally fitting segmentation into autoregressive architectures. To support large-scale training, we introduce a data annotation pipeline and construct the \textbf{SA-OVRS} dataset, which contains \textbf{2M} segmentation masks annotated with over \textbf{5,800} open vocabulary labels or diverse textual descriptions, spanning diverse real-world scenarios. This enables our model to localize objects in images based on text prompts and to generate fine-grained masks. We further introduce the composite metric average Hausdorff Distance (dAHD) to evaluate mask contour fidelity for generative models better. Experiments show that LlamaSeg consistently outperforms existing generative approaches on multiple segmentation benchmarks and delivers finer, more accurate segmentation masks. Code and dataset are available at \href{https://github.com/GML-FMGroup/llamaseg}{https://github.com/GML-FMGroup/llamaseg}.