EasyLabel: A Semi-Automatic Pixel-wise Object Annotation Tool for Creating Robotic RGB-D Datasets

Developing robot perception systems for recognizing objects in the real world requires computer vision algorithms to be carefully scrutinized with respect to the expected operating domain. This demands large quantities of ground truth data to rigorously evaluate the performance of algorithms. This paper presents the EasyLabel tool for easily acquiring high-quality ground truth annotation of objects at pixel-level in densely cluttered scenes. In a semi-automatic process, complex scenes are incrementally built and EasyLabel exploits depth changes to extract precise object masks at each step. We use this tool to generate the Object Cluttered Indoor Dataset (OCID) that captures diverse settings of objects, background, context, sensor to scene distance, viewpoint angle and lighting conditions. OCID is used to perform a systematic comparison of existing object segmentation methods. The baseline comparison supports the need for pixel- and object-wise annotation to progress robot vision towards realistic applications. This insight reveals the usefulness of EasyLabel and OCID to better understand the challenges that robots face in the real world.