Hierarchical Transformer for Visual Affordance Understanding using a Large-scale Dataset

Recognition, detection, and segmentation tasks in machine vision have focused on studying the physical and textural attributes of objects. However, robots and intelligent machines require the ability to understand visual cues, such as the visual affordances that objects offer, to interact intelligently with novel objects. In this paper, we present a large-scale multi-view RGBD visual affordance learning dataset a benchmark of 47,210 RGBD images from 37 object categories, annotated with 15 visual affordance categories and 35 cluttered/complex scenes. We deploy a Vision Transformer (ViT), called Visual Affordance Transformer (VAT), for the affordance segmentation task. Due to its hierarchical architecture, VAT can learn multiple affordances at various scales, making it suitable for objects of varying sizes. Our experimental results show the superior performance of VAT compared to state-of-the-art deep learning networks. In addition, the challenging nature of the proposed dataset highlights the potential for new and robust affordance learning algorithms. Our dataset is publicly available at https://sites.google.com/view/afaqshah/dataset.