Birth of the Object: Detection of Objectness and Extraction of Object Shape through Object-Action complexes

We describe a process in which the segmentation of objects as well as the extraction of the object shape becomes realized through active exploration of a robot vision system. In the exploration process, two behavioral modules that link robot actions to the visual and haptic perception of objects interact. First, by making use of an object independent grasping mechanism, physical control over potential objects can be gained. Having evaluated the initial grasping mechanism as being successful, a second behavior extracts the object shape by making use of prediction based on the motion induced by the robot. This also leads to the concept of an "object" as a set of features that change predictably over different frames. The system is equipped with a certain degree of generic prior knowledge about the world in terms of a sophisticated visual feature extraction process in an early cognitive vision system, knowledge about its own embodiment as well as knowledge about geometric relationships such as rigid body motion. This prior knowledge allows the extraction of representations that are semantically richer compared to many other approaches.