Deep Learning for Surface Material Classification Using Haptic and Visual Information

When a user scratches a hand-held rigid tool across an object surface, an acceleration signal can be captured, which carries relevant information about the surface material properties. More importantly, such haptic acceleration signals can be used together with surface images to jointly recognize the surface material. In this paper, we present a novel deep learning method dealing with the surface material classification problem based on a fully convolutional network, which takes the aforementioned acceleration signal and a corresponding image of the surface texture as inputs. Compared to the existing surface material classification solutions which rely on a careful design of hand-crafted features, our method automatically extracts discriminative features utilizing advanced deep learning methodologies. Experiments performed on the TUM surface material database demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art classification accuracy robustly and efficiently.