  While convolutional neural networks have brought significant advances in
robot vision, their ability is often limited to closed world scenarios, where
the number of semantic concepts to be recognized is determined by the available
training set. Since it is practically impossible to capture all possible
semantic concepts present in the real world in a single training set, we need
to break the closed world assumption, equipping our robot with the capability
to act in an open world. To provide such ability, a robot vision system should
be able to (i) identify whether an instance does not belong to the set of known
categories (i.e. open set recognition), and (ii) extend its knowledge to learn
new classes over time (i.e. incremental learning). In this work, we show how we
can boost the performance of deep open world recognition algorithms by means of
a new loss formulation enforcing a global to local clustering of class-specific
features. In particular, a first loss term, i.e. global clustering, forces the
network to map samples closer to the class centroid they belong to while the
second one, local clustering, shapes the representation space in such a way
that samples of the same class get closer in the representation space while
pushing away neighbours belonging to other classes. Moreover, we propose a
strategy to learn class-specific rejection thresholds, instead of heuristically
estimating a single global threshold, as in previous works. Experiments on
RGB-D Object and Core50 datasets show the effectiveness of our approach.
