DirtNet: Visual Dirt Detection for Autonomous Cleaning Robots

Richard Bormann, Xinjie Wang, Jiawen Xu, Joel Schmidt

Abstract: Visual dirt detection is becoming an important capability of modern professional cleaning robots both for optimizing their wet cleaning results and for facilitating demand-oriented daily vacuum cleaning. This paper presents a robust, fast, and reliable dirt and office item detection system for these tasks based on an adapted YOLOv3 framework. Its superiority over state-of-the-art dirt detection systems is demonstrated in several experiments. The paper furthermore features a dataset generator for creating any number of realistic training images from a small set of real scene, dirt, and object examples.