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liangnjupt/vistouch

Analysis updated 2026-08-14

896PythonAudience · researcherComplexity · 2/5Setup · moderate

TLDR

A dataset of matched video, audio, and touch recordings from a robot hand sliding across everyday materials, plus lightweight starter models for multimodal sensing research.

Mindmap

mindmap
  root((repo))
    What it does
      Robot touch recordings
      Matched video audio touch
      8 materials 2000 samples
    Benchmarks
      Material recognition
      Tactile super resolution
      Cross-modal retrieval
      Cross-modal generation
    Tech stack
      Python
      CPU trainable models
      Google Drive downloads
    Use cases
      Study multisensory data
      Train touch recognition
      Generate touch from sound
    Audience
      Robotics researchers
      Multimodal AI study

Code map

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What do people build with it?

USE CASE 1

Train a model to identify materials a robot is touching from combined video, audio, and force data.

USE CASE 2

Reconstruct clean touch signals from noisy, low-rate force measurements.

USE CASE 3

Build a system that retrieves the matching sound clip when given a touch recording.

USE CASE 4

Generate a force curve from sound alone as a cross-modal experiment.

What is it built with?

PythonCPU

How does it compare?

liangnjupt/vistouchfacebookresearch/sonarkappaemme-git/codex-first-customer-finder-skill
Stars896896901
LanguagePythonPythonPython
Last pushed2025-10-10
MaintenanceQuiet
Setup difficultymoderatemoderateeasy
Complexity2/54/52/5
Audienceresearcherresearcherpm founder

Figures from each repo's GitHub metadata at analysis time.

How do you get it running?

Difficulty · moderate Time to first run · 30min

Data files are not in the repo and must be downloaded externally from Google Drive or Baidu Netdisk before running any benchmarks.

In plain English

VisTouch is a dataset project that captures what happens when a robot hand slides across everyday materials like silk, wood, brass, and stone. While the robot presses and slides, three sensors record the same event at the same time: a camera films it, a microphone picks up the sound, and a force sensor measures the physical pressure. The result is a collection of matched video, audio, and touch recordings that researchers can use to study how different senses relate to each other. The full research corpus covers 47 material categories and contains millions of raw sensor readings. This public release is a smaller, curated slice: 2000 timestamp-aligned triplets covering 8 materials, with a predefined split between training and test data. The split is designed so that models trained on lower pressures get tested on higher pressures, which measures whether they can generalize to conditions they have not seen. Every sample is a real sensor capture, with no synthetic data mixed in. The repository includes scripts for four benchmark tasks. Material recognition tries to identify what the robot is touching based on the fused audio, tactile, and video signals, reaching 76 percent accuracy on the sliding test compared with a 12.5 percent chance baseline. Tactile super-resolution takes a noisy, low-rate force measurement and reconstructs a clean signal. Cross-modal retrieval asks whether a touch recording can be used to find the matching sound clip. Cross-modal generation attempts to produce a force curve from sound alone. The data files are not stored in the repository itself. Instead, the repo provides an empty dataset folder and links to external downloads on Google Drive and Baidu Netdisk. Once downloaded, the files follow a simple folder structure and require no additional configuration. Baseline models are intentionally lightweight, trainable on a CPU in minutes, and serve as starting points rather than state-of-the-art results. The project roadmap mentions plans to release more material categories, additional sliding paths and camera views, and deeper model architectures in future updates. The full README is longer than what was shown.

Copy-paste prompts

Prompt 1
Using the VisTouch dataset structure, write a Python script to load a timestamp-aligned triplet of video, audio, and tactile data from the downloaded folder, and display each modality side by side.
Prompt 2
Create a simple baseline classifier in PyTorch that fuses audio, tactile, and video features from VisTouch to predict which of the 8 materials a sample belongs to, trainable on CPU in minutes.
Prompt 3
Write code to implement cross-modal retrieval on VisTouch: given a tactile recording, compute a similarity score against audio embeddings and return the top matching sound clip.
Prompt 4
Generate a force curve from an audio clip using a small neural network, following the VisTouch cross-modal generation benchmark setup.

Frequently asked questions

What is vistouch?

A dataset of matched video, audio, and touch recordings from a robot hand sliding across everyday materials, plus lightweight starter models for multimodal sensing research.

What language is vistouch written in?

Mainly Python. The stack also includes Python, CPU.

How hard is vistouch to set up?

Setup difficulty is rated moderate, with roughly 30min to a first successful run.

Who is vistouch for?

Mainly researcher.

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