Visual-Tactile Sensing for In-Hand Object Reconstruction

Tactile sensing is one of the modalities human rely on heavily to perceive the world. Working with vision, this modality refines local geometry structure, measures deformation at contact area, and indicates hand-object contact state. With the availability of open-source tactile sensors such as DIGIT, research on visual-tactile learning is becoming more accessible and reproducible. Leveraging this tactile sensor, we propose a novel visual-tactile in-hand object reconstruction framework VTacO, and extend it to VTacOH for hand-object reconstruction. Since our method can support both rigid and deformable object reconstruction, and no existing benchmark are proper for the goal. We propose a simulation environment, VT-Sim, which supports to generate hand-object interaction for both rigid and deformable objects. With VT-Sim, we generate a large-scale training dataset, and evaluate our method on it. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed method can outperform the previous baseline methods qualitatively and quantitatively. Finally, we directly apply our model trained in simulation to various real-world test cases, which display qualitative results. Codes, models, simulation environment, datasets will be publicly available.