Improved Semantic Segmentation from Ultra-Low-Resolution RGB Images Applied to Privacy-Preserving Object-Goal Navigation




Authors:

X. Huang, S. Pan, O. Zatsarynna, J. Gall, M. Bennewitz

Type:

Preprint

Published in:

Arxiv Pre-print

Year:

2025

Related Projects:

PRIVATAR - Privacy-friendly Mobile Avatars for Sick School Children

Links:

Preprint

BibTex String

@article{huang2025improved,
title={Improved Semantic Segmentation from Ultra-Low-Resolution RGB Images Applied to Privacy-Preserving Object-Goal Navigation},
author={Huang, Xuying and Pan, Sicong and Zatsarynna, Olga and Gall, Juergen and Bennewitz, Maren},
journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2507.16034},
year={2025}
}
Topic

Abstract:

User privacy in mobile robotics has become a critical concern. Existing methods typically prioritize either the performance of downstream robotic tasks or privacy protection, with the latter often constraining the effectiveness of task execution. To jointly address both objectives, we study semantic-based robot navigation in an ultra-low-resolution setting to preserve visual privacy. A key challenge in such scenarios is recovering semantic segmentation from ultra-low-resolution RGB images. In this work, we introduce a novel fully joint-learning method that integrates an agglomerative feature extractor and a segmentation-aware discriminator to solve ultra-low-resolution semantic segmentation, thereby enabling privacy-preserving, semantic object-goal navigation. Our method outperforms different baselines on ultra-low-resolution semantic segmentation and our improved segmentation results increase the success rate of the semantic object-goal navigation in a real-world privacy-constrained scenario.