Toward Computer Vision Systems that Understand Real-World Assembly Processes

Many applications of computer vision require robust systems that can parse complex structures as they evolve in time. Using a block construction task as a case study, we illustrate the main components involved in building such systems. We evaluate performance at three increasingly-detailed levels of spatial granularity on two multimodal (RGBD + IMU) datasets. On the first, designed to match the assumptions of the model, we report better than 90% accuracy at the finest level of granularity. On the second, designed to test the robustness of our model under adverse, real-world conditions, we report 67% accuracy and 91% precision at the mid-level of granularity. We show that this seemingly simple process presents many opportunities to expand the frontiers of computer vision and action recognition.