Pixel-aligned RGB-NIR Stereo Imaging and Dataset for Robot Vision

Integrating RGB and NIR imaging provides complementary spectral information, enhancing robotic vision in challenging lighting conditions. However, existing datasets and imaging systems lack pixel-level alignment between RGB and NIR images, posing challenges for downstream tasks.In this paper, we develop a robotic vision system equipped with two pixel-aligned RGB-NIR stereo cameras and a LiDAR sensor mounted on a mobile robot. The system simultaneously captures RGB stereo images, NIR stereo images, and temporally synchronized LiDAR point cloud. Utilizing the mobility of the robot, we present a dataset containing continuous video frames with pixel-aligned RGB and NIR stereo pairs under diverse lighting conditions.We introduce two methods that utilize our pixel-aligned RGB-NIR images: an RGB-NIR image fusion method and a feature fusion method. The first approach enables existing RGB-pretrained vision models to directly utilize RGB-NIR information without fine-tuning. The second approach fine-tunes existing vision models to more effectively utilize RGB-NIR information.Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of using pixel-aligned RGB-NIR images across diverse lighting conditions.