Persistent Anytime Learning of Objects from Unseen Classes

We present a fast and very effective method for object classification that is particularly suited for robotic applications such as grasping and semantic mapping. Our approach is based on a Random Forest classifier that can be trained incrementally. This has the major benefit that semantic information from new data samples can be incorporated without retraining the entire model. Even if new samples from a previously unseen class are presented, our method is able to perform efficient updates and learn a sustainable representation for this new class. Further features of our method include a very fast and memory-efficient implementation, as well as the ability to interrupt the learning process at any time without a significant performance degradation. Experiments on benchmark data for robotic applications show the clear benefits of our incremental approach and its competitiveness with standard offline methods in terms of classification accuracy.