Coarobo GK Founder Receives Best Paper Award at IEEE IRC 2024

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Coarobo GK Founder Receives Best Paper Award at IEEE IRC 2024

Tokyo, JapanDecember 13, 2024

Coarobo GK is pleased to announce that a co-authored research paper involving its President & Founder, Lotfi El Hafi, received a Best Paper Award at the 2024 IEEE International Conference on Robotic Computing (IRC 2024), held in Tokyo, Japan, from December 11 to 13, 2024. The conference is sponsored by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) . The award was conferred at the closing ceremony on December 13, 2024.

The award-winning paper, titled "Real-World Instance-specific Image Goal Navigation: Bridging Domain Gaps via Contrastive Learning" , was co-authored by Taichi Sakaguchi, Akira Taniguchi, Yoshinobu Hagiwara, Lotfi El Hafi, Shoichi Hasegawa, and Tadahiro Taniguchi, with the other co-authors affiliated with Ritsumeikan University. The study introduces a novel few-shot cross-quality instance-aware adaptation (CrossIA) method that combines contrastive learning with a pretrained deblurring model to bridge the domain gap between low-quality robot observations and high-quality user-provided query images. Evaluated on a real-world instance-specific image goal navigation task with 20 different instance types, the proposed method improved task success rates by up to three-fold compared to a baseline.

Image-goal navigation in real homes still depends heavily on the visual quality gap between what users can capture and what robots actually see. This award recognizes a practical step forward, and we are grateful to the IEEE IRC 2024 Award Committee and to the co-authors from Ritsumeikan University.

Lotfi El Hafi, President & Founder of Coarobo GK

Coarobo GK extends its sincere appreciation to the IRC 2024 Award Committee, all co-authors, and the supporting institutions for this recognition.

Citation

T. Sakaguchi, A. Taniguchi, Y. Hagiwara, L. El Hafi, S. Hasegawa, and T. Taniguchi, โ€œReal-World Instance-specific Image Goal Navigation: Bridging Domain Gaps via Contrastive Learning,โ€ in Proceedings of 2024 IEEE International Conference on Robotic Computing (IRC 2024), pp. 139-146, Tokyo, Japan, Dec. 11, 2024. DOI: 10.1109/IRC63610.2024.00032

Abstract

"Improving instance-specific image goal navigation (InstanceImageNav), which involves locating an object in the real world that is identical to a query image, is essential for enabling robots to help users find desired objects. The challenge lies in the domain gap between the low-quality images observed by the moving robot, characterized by motion blur and low resolution, and the high-quality query images provided by the user. These domain gaps can significantly reduce the task success rate, yet previous work has not adequately addressed them. To tackle this issue, we propose a novel method: few-shot cross-quality instance-aware adaptation (CrossIA). This approach employs contrastive learning with an instance classifier to align features between a large set of low-quality images and a small set of high-quality images. We fine-tuned the SimSiam model, pretrained on ImageNet, using CrossIA with instance labels based on a 3D semantic map. Additionally, our system integrates object image collection with a pretrained deblurring model to enhance the quality of the observed images. Evaluated on an InstanceImageNav task with 20 different instance types, our method improved the task success rate by up to three-fold compared to a baseline based on SuperGlue. These findings highlight the potential of contrastive learning and image enhancement techniques in improving object localization in robotic applications."

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Coarobo GK Founder Receives Best Paper Award at IEEE IRC 2024
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