  Unsupervised object modeling is important in robotics, especially for
handling a large set of objects. We present a method for unsupervised 3D object
discovery, reconstruction, and localization that exploits multiple instances of
an identical object contained in a single RGB-D image. The proposed method does
not rely on segmentation, scene knowledge, or user input, and thus is easily
scalable. Our method aims to find recurrent patterns in a single RGB-D image by
utilizing appearance and geometry of the salient regions. We extract keypoints
and match them in pairs based on their descriptors. We then generate triplets
of the keypoints matching with each other using several geometric criteria to
minimize false matches. The relative poses of the matched triplets are computed
and clustered to discover sets of triplet pairs with similar relative poses.
Triplets belonging to the same set are likely to belong to the same object and
are used to construct an initial object model. Detection of remaining instances
with the initial object model using RANSAC allows to further expand and refine
the model. The automatically generated object models are both compact and
descriptive. We show quantitative and qualitative results on RGB-D images with
various objects including some from the Amazon Picking Challenge. We also
demonstrate the use of our method in an object picking scenario with a robotic
arm.
