Tactile-Augmented Radiance Fields

Abstract

We present a scene representation that brings vision and touch into a shared 3D space which we call a tactile-augmented radiance field. This representation capitalizes on two key insights: (i) ubiquitous vision-based touch sensors are built on perspective cameras and (ii) visually and structurally similar regions of a scene share the same tactile features. We use these insights to train a conditional diffusion model that provided with an RGB image and a depth map rendered from a neural radiance field generates its corresponding tactile "image". To train this diffusion model we collect the largest collection of spatially-aligned visual and tactile data. Through qualitative and quantitative experiments we demonstrate the accuracy of our cross-modal generative model and the utility of collected and rendered visual-tactile pairs across a range of downstream tasks. Project page: https://dou-yiming.github.io/TaRF