  It is well-established by cognitive neuroscience that human perception of
objects constitutes a complex process, where object appearance information is
combined with evidence about the so-called object "affordances", namely the
types of actions that humans typically perform when interacting with them. This
fact has recently motivated the "sensorimotor" approach to the challenging task
of automatic object recognition, where both information sources are fused to
improve robustness. In this work, the aforementioned paradigm is adopted,
surpassing current limitations of sensorimotor object recognition research.
Specifically, the deep learning paradigm is introduced to the problem for the
first time, developing a number of novel neuro-biologically and
neuro-physiologically inspired architectures that utilize state-of-the-art
neural networks for fusing the available information sources in multiple ways.
The proposed methods are evaluated using a large RGB-D corpus, which is
specifically collected for the task of sensorimotor object recognition and is
made publicly available. Experimental results demonstrate the utility of
affordance information to object recognition, achieving an up to 29% relative
error reduction by its inclusion.
