RoboEye: Enhancing 2D Robotic Object Identification with Selective 3D Geometric Keypoint Matching

The rapidly growing number of product categories in large-scale e-commerce makes accurate object identification for automated packing in warehouses substantially more difficult. As the catalog grows, intra-class variability and a long tail of rare or visually similar items increase, and when combined with diverse packaging, cluttered containers, frequent occlusion, and large viewpoint changes-these factors amplify discrepancies between query and reference images, causing sharp performance drops for methods that rely solely on 2D appearance features. Thus, we propose RoboEye, a two-stage identification framework that dynamically augments 2D semantic features with domain-adapted 3D reasoning and lightweight adapters to bridge training deployment gaps. In the first stage, we train a large vision model to extract 2D features for generating candidate rankings. A lightweight 3D-feature-awareness module then estimates 3D feature quality and predicts whether 3D re-ranking is necessary, preventing performance degradation and avoiding unnecessary computation. When invoked, the second stage uses our robot 3D retrieval transformer, comprising a 3D feature extractor that produces geometry-aware dense features and a keypoint-based matcher that computes keypoint-correspondence confidences between query and reference images instead of conventional cosine-similarity scoring. Experiments show that RoboEye improves Recall@1 by 7.1% over the prior state of the art (RoboLLM). Moreover, RoboEye operates using only RGB images, avoiding reliance on explicit 3D inputs and reducing deployment costs. The code used in this paper is publicly available at: https://github.com/longkukuhi/RoboEye.