  Robust object recognition is a crucial ingredient of many, if not all,
real-world robotics applications. This paper leverages recent progress on
Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and proposes a novel RGB-D architecture
for object recognition. Our architecture is composed of two separate CNN
processing streams - one for each modality - which are consecutively combined
with a late fusion network. We focus on learning with imperfect sensor data, a
typical problem in real-world robotics tasks. For accurate learning, we
introduce a multi-stage training methodology and two crucial ingredients for
handling depth data with CNNs. The first, an effective encoding of depth
information for CNNs that enables learning without the need for large depth
datasets. The second, a data augmentation scheme for robust learning with depth
images by corrupting them with realistic noise patterns. We present
state-of-the-art results on the RGB-D object dataset and show recognition in
challenging RGB-D real-world noisy settings.
