Self-Paced Attribute Prototype Contrastive Learning for Cross-Modal Materials Perception

The contactless interaction approach enables robots to identify object attributes via sensors and advanced perceptual technologies, eliminating the need for physical contact. This approach enhances interaction flexibility and safety while offering a richer, more intuitive human-robot experience. Current research focuses on cross-modal retrieval through non-contact feature extraction, enabling material attribute estimation and advancing object perception. However, existing cross-modal material retrieval methods overlook learning common attributes shared within the same material type. To address this, we propose Materials Perception with Self-paced Prototype contrastive Learning (MPSPL). First, attribute prototype contrastive learning extracts shared characteristics within the same material type, aggregates similar samples, and enhances the perception of deep model material attributes. Second, a self-paced learning strategy dynamically adjusts the contrastive loss temperature coefficient, guiding the model to discern discriminative features across materials and progressively recognize inherent attributes. Finally, extensive experiments validate our method under both known and unknown material category conditions. Experiments demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method over state-of-the-art approaches.