Vision2Touch: Imaging Estimation of Surface Tactile Physical Properties

Similar to the human’s multiple perception system, the robot can also benefit from cross-modal learning. The connection between visual input and tactile perception is potentially important for automated operations. However, establishing an algorithmic mapping of the visual modal to the tactile modal is a challenging task. In this work, we use the framework of GANs to propose a cross-modal imaging method for estimating the tactile physical properties values based on the Gramian Summation Angular Field, combined with visual-tactile embedding cluster fusion and feature matching methods. The approach estimates 15 tactile properties. In particular, the task attempts to predict unknown surface properties based on "learned knowledge". Our results surpass the state-of-the-art approach on most tactile dimensions of the publicly available dataset. Additionally, we conduct a robustness study to verify the effect of angle and complex environment on the network prediction performance.