CADTrack: Instructions and Support for Orientation Disambiguation of Near-Symmetrical Objects

Determining the correct orientation of objects can be critical to succeed in tasks like assembly and quality assurance. In particular, near-symmetrical objects may require careful inspection of small visual features to disambiguate their orientation. We propose CADTrack, a digital assistant for providing instructions and support for tasks where the object orientation matters but may be hard to disambiguate with the naked eye. Additionally, we present a deep learning pipeline for tracking the orientation of near-symmetrical objects. In contrast to existing approaches, which require labeled datasets involving laborious data acquisition and annotation processes, CADTrack uses a digital model of the object to generate synthetic data and train a convolutional neural network. Furthermore, we extend the architecture of Mask R-CNN with a confidence prediction branch to avoid errors caused by misleading orientation guidance. We evaluate CADTrack in a user study, comparing our tracking-based instructions to other methods to confirm the benefits of our approach in terms of preference and required effort.