Teaching Cameras to Feel: Estimating Tactile Physical Properties of Surfaces From Images

Matthew Purri, Kristin Dana ;

The connection between visual input and tactile sensing is critical for object manipulation tasks such as grasping, pushing, and maneuvering. In this work, we introduce the challenging task of estimating a set of tactile physical properties from visual information. We aim to build a model that learns the complex mapping between visual information and tactile physical properties. We construct a first of its kind image-tactile dataset with over 400 multiview image sequences and the corresponding tactile properties. A total of 15 tactile physical properties across categories including friction, compliance, adhesion, texture, and thermal conductance are measured and then estimated by our models. We develop a cross-modal framework comprised of an adversarial objective and a novel visuo-tactile cluster classification loss. Additionally, we develop a neural architecture search framework capable of learning to select optimal combinations of viewing angles for estimating a given physical property."