DarkSeg: Infrared-Driven Semantic Segmentation for Garment Grasping Detection in Low-Light Conditions

Garment grasping in low-light environments is a critical challenge for domestic intelligent robots, yet existing research has not sufficiently addressed this issue. In low-light conditions, the scarcity of visual features due to insufficient illumination causes different categories of garments to exhibit ambiguous feature similarities, thereby hindering the robot’s ability to detect the categories of different garments. Although traditional methods can compensate for visual deficiencies in low-light scenarios by applying preprocessing strategies that fuse infrared multimodal features, their complex computational processes incur significant computational overhead. To address this limitation, we propose a low-light garment detection model based on the student-teacher model. The innovation of DarkSeg lies in its replacement of complex multimodal feature fusion with an indirect feature alignment mechanism between the student and teacher models, thereby circumventing high computational demands. Through feature alignment, DarkSeg enables the student model to learn illumination-invariant structural representations from the infrared features provided by the teacher model, effectively correcting structural deficiencies in low-light environments. Furthermore, to evaluate DarkSeg’s feasibility for low-light clothing grasping, we propose a depth-perceptive grasping strategy and build a low-light multimodal garment detection dataset, DarkClothes. Extensive experiments deploying DarkSeg on a Baxter robot demonstrate that DarkSeg achieves a 22% improvement in the grasping success rate while reducing the model parameters by 99.08 million compared to traditional methods, validating the practical viability of DarkSeg for robotic garment grasping in low-light conditions. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/Zhonghaifeng6/Darkseg