Rethinking Transparent Object Grasping: Depth Completion With Monocular Depth Estimation and Instance Mask

Accurate depth maps are essential for robotic grasping. However, transparent objects often cause depth cameras to produce missing or distorted depth due to reflection and refraction, making grasping them particularly challenging. Precise depth estimation for transparent objects is therefore crucial. Existing end-to-end methods aim to predict depth directly from RGB-D inputs. However, depth distortion varies significantly with environment, viewpoint, and illumination, making it difficult to predict. Models trained on limited datasets often fail to generalize effectively in real-world applications. In this letter, we propose ReMake, a novel transparent object depth completion framework that injects structured priors to reformulate the depth estimation learning objective. First, we introduce a mask prior to explicitly separate transparent regions from reliable background depth. This separation ensures consistency between training and real-world application, where masked areas correspond to transparent regions and unmasked areas to opaque ones. This improves the model's generalizability in real-world applications. Second, we further incorporate relative depth as an additional prior obtained from monocular depth estimation, which encodes the depth relationship between transparent objects and their background to guide the reconstruction of transparent regions more effectively. Extensive experiments across datasets and real-world scenes demonstrate that ReMake significantly outperforms existing methods, especially in different-view prediction experiments, evaluating its generalizabilityCode and videos are available at <uri xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">https://chengyaofeng.github.io/ReMake.github.io/</uri>.

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Publication Details

Journal
IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters
Published
2026-03-13
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1109/lra.2026.3673898
Primary Topic
Robot Manipulation and Learning
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
0.00
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article

Rethinking Transparent Object Grasping: Depth Completion With Monocular Depth Estimation and Instance Mask

Fusheng Zha, Chenguang Yang, Yaofeng Cheng, Lin Sun et al.
IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters
Robot Manipulation and Learning
article

Rethinking Transparent Object Grasping: Depth Completion With Monocular Depth Estimation and Instance Mask

Fusheng Zha, Chenguang Yang, Yaofeng Cheng, Lin Sun, X. Gao, Sen Zhang, Chengang Zeng
article en

Abstract

Accurate depth maps are essential for robotic grasping. However, transparent objects often cause depth cameras to produce missing or distorted depth due to reflection and refraction, making grasping them particularly challenging. Precise depth estimation for transparent objects is therefore crucial. Existing end-to-end methods aim to predict depth directly from RGB-D inputs. However, depth distortion varies significantly with environment, viewpoint, and illumination, making it difficult to predict. Models trained on limited datasets often fail to generalize effectively in real-world applications. In this letter, we propose ReMake, a novel transparent object depth completion framework that injects structured priors to reformulate the depth estimation learning objective. First, we introduce a mask prior to explicitly separate transparent regions from reliable background depth. This separation ensures consistency between training and real-world application, where masked areas correspond to transparent regions and unmasked areas to opaque ones. This improves the model's generalizability in real-world applications. Second, we further incorporate relative depth as an additional prior obtained from monocular depth estimation, which encodes the depth relationship between transparent objects and their background to guide the reconstruction of transparent regions more effectively. Extensive experiments across datasets and real-world scenes demonstrate that ReMake significantly outperforms existing methods, especially in different-view prediction experiments, evaluating its generalizabilityCode and videos are available at <uri xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">https://chengyaofeng.github.io/ReMake.github.io/</uri>.

IEEE Robotics and Automation LettersVol. 11(5)
University of Liverpool (GB), Harbin Institute of Technology (CN)
Openalex Percentile: Top 99%
Robot Manipulation and Learning
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