RVCO 2015 - 2015 Workshop on Robotic Vision: challenges and opportunities

The technologies of robotics and computer vision are each over 50 years old. Once upon a time they were closely related and investigated, separately and together, in AI labs around the world. Vision has always been a hard problem, and early roboticists struggled to make vision work using the slow computers of the day ? particularly for metric problems like understanding the geometry of the world. In the 1990s affordable laser rangefinders entered the scene and roboticists adopted them with enthusiasm, delighted with the metric information they could provide. Since that time laser-based perception has come to dominate robotics, while processing images from databases, not from robots, has come to dominate computer vision. What happened to that early partnership between robotics and vision? Is it forever broken, or is now the time to reconsider vision as an effective sensor for robotics?
Corke’s plenary talk at IROS14 was concerned with the split between the robotics and computer vision communities. Roboticists have largely adopted LIDAR and RGBD sensors, whereas the computer vision community is content to process images from non-real time sources such as databases. Even though “computer vision” is a popular keyword in robotics conferences, the converse is not true, there are very few robotics papers at computer vision conferences. A show of hands during the plenary indicated less than 20 out of 1600 IROS delegates attend mainstream computer vision conferences such as ICCV or CVPR. There is much to be gained from the use of computer vision as the primary sensing modality for robots. This discipline split, and how to rectify it, seemed to have touched a nerve, and I was approached by many people who shared the belief that it was an issue that should be rectified. This workshop will work to bridge this gap by presenting state-of-the-art techniques from the computer vision community to the robotics community, and a panel discussion to flesh out a roadmap of the challenges and open questions for computer vision, from a robotics perspective.
Objectives
The objectives of the workshop are therefore to:
Inform the robotics community about the state of the art in computer vision, through invited talks by prominent members of the computer vision community.
Run a panel discussion to flesh out a roadmap of the challenges and open questions for computer vision, from a robotics perspective.
The organizing group will also propose reciprocal workshops at one of the main computer vision conferences in 2015. One of the proposers, Corke, has also guest edited two special issues of IJRR dedicated to Robot Vision.
The intended audience is a broad cross section of those attending ICRA 2015 and would include academics involved in teaching and research, graduate research students and industry practitioners.
Topics
Semantic vision
Convolutional neural networks
Architectures
Visual SLAM
Object recognition
Human recognition, human activity/expression recognition
Active vision