Hierarchical Material Recognition from Local Appearance

We introduce a taxonomy of solid materials for hierarchical material recognition from local appearance. Our taxonomy is motivated by vision applications, and is arranged according to the physical traits of materials. We contribute a diverse dataset of images and aligned depth maps of materials in the wild. The depth maps can be used to generate novel views to augment the dataset. Utilizing the taxonomy and dataset, we present a learning-based approach to hierarchical material recognition that uses graph neural networks. Our model leverages taxonomic proximity between material classes, and achieves state-of-the-art performance. We show that our model has the potential to generalize in few-shot learning settings. As a result, it achieves coarse classification of underrepresented materials.